The Remnants of War
by Phoenix Serapha
Summary: Longawaited sequel to A Ballad of War. Some characters have moved on others are left to try to find a life after war. Yes, I finally posted it. :
1. Chapter 1: The Unnamed Soldier

Author's Note: Well, well, well. It's been quite a while, hasn't it? I think I've been receiving emails for upwards of two years asking for this fic, so I've finally decided to post it. I do, however, have a few things to say about it first. **Most prominently**, this is the companion piece or sequel, if you prefer, to my previous fic "A Ballad of War," which I started posting a few years ago. If you have not finished reading Ballad or have never read it before, this story will make absolutely no sense. **Secondly **- **and perhaps more importantly **- I wrote these two stories when I was fifteen and sixteen. I'm twenty now, so they do not any longer reflect my writing style. **Thirdly**, the only excuse I can offer for my neglecting the requests for this fic is that I've been very busy with college and with my original novel. However, it's summer now, and I do promise to respond to my readers much more thoroughly now. That being said, thanks for your persistence in asking me to post this, and as always, comments are most gratefully welcome.

The Remnants of War

_awaken, my darling_

The Unnamed Soldier

It had ceased to matter now, and if it had ever truly mattered, he could not remember it doing so. The memories of what had happened had not yet begun to fade, but already they had been made obsolete, and because of this he could endure them.

The thought of such endurance no longer disturbed him. His mind had often been plagued by much worse.

If history and his own past were ever to have taught him anything, it should have been that true peace did not exist, not for any country, for any colony, for any person. Yet strangely he found that the state in which he existed these days was something very close to peace, a life that was temporarily beyond hiatus, beyond the interruptions around which he had once centered his miserable excuse of a life. He tried to think nothing of it, and very often he succeeded.

_What will you do, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?_

Phantom words from a long-ago voice, a question that had never needed an answer. Ironic that Odin's voice should plague him now, so many months since they had last spoken. Had he been a believer in such things, he might have taken this to mean they never would again.

This, too, did not disturb him.

The war had ended much as predicted. No words needed be said about it now. He had accomplished his final mission and at its completion no new one had been given to him. He had become, as Odin had once said he would, a soldier devoid of purpose.

Perhaps the others had become the same. He didn't know. He didn't care. What use were any of them to each other now? What use were any of them to each other but reminders of all that could now not be changed, of all the past transgressions of which they all believed themselves guilty that could not be absolved?

He no longer counted himself among their numbers. He had no use for the romance of such guilt. He was not the profound contemplation of Odin Lowe, nor was he the grim poetic dignitary of Zechs Marquise. What he himself was he had yet to learn.

The graves of the Earth's last conflict were many and unmarked. The final battle outside the Sanq Kingdom had claimed the most lives, though their numbers were never fully counted; it was in this battle that he himself had almost lost his life, when Zechs's mind had again been unable to overcome the new system he had installed in the Epyon.

It didn't matter. None of it did.

It was over these unmarked graves that he now stood, thinking of those who lay beneath them, of the past and of the present, of everything, and then of nothing at all. The grass had long grown over the scattered mounds that protested, against all that now seemed truthful, that those who had found their cold beds in them had never once existed. Only a few actual graves were dug here; many of the bodies from that last battle were never recovered, lost completely to the fires that had consumed their suits, but nonetheless this forsaken piece of land was a graveyard, yet another place left by war that bade the living keep out while the dead kept vigil over the dead.

This place suited him.

The ground was still charred in places, the trees surrounding it dead and blackened. He found it strange that Relena had not commissioned it to be landscaped and restored yet. Perhaps she had finally realized the significance of this decadent blemish upon her beautiful pacifist nation.

_Relena_. He had not thought of her for so long, did not truly think about her now; he had not even considered the dramatic change he had beheld in her the last time he had seen her. No longer was she the naïve child she had been when they had parted after the Eve Wars, nor was she the rising dignitary she had been after the Mariemaia incident. She was something else entirely now, something colder and yet wiser, something more like Zechs himself than was perhaps best for her. He did not need to have seen her that night in Thessalonikí, among the ruins of the base, to know this. All around him people spoke of it and though he had learned nothing new of her, he knew it was true. Perhaps there was hope for her yet. And perhaps he should have felt something, some greater pang of regret, for not having thought of her in the years it had been since they had last truly spoken, for not grieving the loss of the innocent girl who had once been Relena Darlian. Maybe he should have, but he did not. He could not. He had never possessed any sentimental notions toward her, no sense of camaraderie. He had, even in all the time they had been forced to spend together during the wars of AC 195, never really thought of her as anything more than a hindrance and a child.

_Believe in me, Relena._

Of course she would; of course she did. She had believed in everything then. He was nothing of importance for having gained her agreement.

Perhaps she had finally grown enough to see beyond her ideals while still advocating them. Maybe now it was she and others like her who could benefit the world, not embittered soldiers lost to all the wars they could not stop fighting.

She left his thoughts as quickly as she had almost come into them. She was ultimately of little consequence to him.

He walked slowly over the ruined field as one lost in thought might do. His footsteps were too silent to disturb the rest of those who had died beneath them. Did any of them care that he had come, a living being into their mass grave to taunt them with the breath that he drew that they would never take again? Did they care that he walked so carelessly over the spot where the remains of their lifeless bodies had either been buried or burned? Did any care that he would without hesitation have taken each of their places?

He didn't believe this. He himself found it not worth giving a damn.

A slight breeze blew through the dead woods, shaking the cracked limbs and rustling leaves that had sprouted as nothing short of a miracle. The restless dead could use the wind as their voiceless whisper for all he cared; he had no desire to romanticize their souls' loss any longer. Was not one, either life or death, inherently better than the other?

A useless soldier's thoughts were not needed here. He had spoken their unwritten epitaph just by being here, by walking among their graves and over their tattered corpses. He was not needed anymore. Perhaps he had never been needed in the first place.

He looked out at the ocean, at the peninsula farther away on which the green of the trees was rich and untainted, and he wondered if he was the last to leave Greece. Yuan-Chen had taken his leave three days following the war's official close, disclosing the knowledge of his departure only to Odin and to Heero. He never expected to see the man again.

"_This war is over, Takeru. When will you cease in fighting your own battle?"_

The old man's voice, his ancient withered hands lighting upon his shoulders. Flinching, almost in a moment of cowardice pulling away. Even Odin, despite their many encounters in which Heero had heard similar, never actually touched him.

"_This once, Takeru, I request an answer."_ An endearing smile, such a sincere expression.

How dare you care about me. How dare you. How dare you.

"I'm not fighting anything."

A quiet laugh, ironic and yet at the same time conveying no bitterness. "True. You do not fight anything—you fight against everything. You rage quietly against everything that can claim even one moment in your life. You will realize someday, Takeru, that you are only fighting against yourself."

_How dare you._

It was believed that Yuan-Chen had returned to his native China with his nephews—who had left soon afterward—and perhaps he had, but Heero thought it more likely that he had, after all these years away, at long last gone back to Japan. Let him go back, let him go back to those candlelit rooms scented of incense and solitude, to those shrines, to that order that was both monastic and secular. Let him go back to her grave. He didn't care.

He did care.

He did, and perhaps this was why he could think about these things.

Odin had remained longer and then abruptly disappeared, without notice or farewell even to Heero. There had been no torturous parting words between them. The scar on his hand and the infrequent pain of it were now the only indications that Odin Lowe had ever existed.

He sometimes thought that he saw Odin, a mere glimpse of a face in a crowd, and saw nothing, saw sometimes a man who merely resembled him and sometimes no one at all. He would then be unable to even think for several minutes, and if indeed Odin Lowe were watching him, he was undoubtedly pleased with this reaction.

Did he really believe that Odin was again following him, seeking him out to fulfill some purpose that only he knew, or perhaps only to monitor the course of his life? No. He did not. He had a feeling that the end of the war had in turn marked the end of their dealings with each other. There was no longer any reason for their contact or for one to be a presence in the other's life. Odin had finally been able to see what Heero had become—if he had failed Sakura, so be it. There was nothing they could do for each other now; the contract was ended. Odin was now free to find his next purpose, leaving Heero to continue a life that was without one.

He was beginning to hear his voice more often, though. He could almost hear it now, a low timbre beneath the slight wind, speaking of something Heero did not want to know, asking questions he did not want to answer.

_How dare you care about me. How dare you. _

How dare you.

"How dare you," he whispered, the first words he had spoken in days, the first words that had perhaps ever been spoken over this unconsecrated ground. Would the dead now take note of him, would they hear his voice and find it more suitable than the wind? Let them have it then. It no longer served him efficiently.

The voice beneath the breeze, the words that only he could hear, ceased. He looked into the woods, caught a brief glance of Odin's face that immediately faded into shadow.

"I have nothing to say to you," he said, and then louder he repeated it, shuddering as the words left his lips. His voice was hoarse and choked from days of disuse.

The words did not echo back to him.

"And you have nothing to say to me," he mumbled, shrugging his bare shoulders and letting his hands fall, defeated, from his pockets. No answer was received, either from the air or from those over those whose remains he now walked, from the voice that spoke to him even when the man to whom it belonged was not present. Perhaps one did truly need to be alone to be defeated.

Or perhaps they were all already defeated, every one of them, both those with a purpose and those without. Perhaps they had been defeated from the beginning, really.

It sounded like something Zechs would say. He had realized in the past two years that they truly were more alike than he cared to admit.

He wondered if Odin would think the same.

He passed through the empty graveyard, giving not thought or word to the raised mounds or to the dead patches where grass would perhaps never grow again. It didn't matter now. He walked to the edge of the field, the abrupt cliff that overlooked the sea. This place would suffice.

He sat on the edge of the drop-off, watched the water below his feet. The ocean was calm today, chilled by the wind but nonetheless lighted by the sun, and too deep at this point for him to see the bottom. The cold darkness of those depths invited him, beseeched him to plunge into its embrace, to find solace there as he had not found it in life.

He almost smiled at the thought of it.

Later he could give himself to it, if it so desired him. Right now he had something else to surrender.

He reached into his pocket, withdrew a crumpled photograph. It had been in perfect condition when it had been given to him and in the year since it had become creased and bent, its edges torn and ragged. Funny that he should feel regret that it was now so battered.

The photograph had been taken in the final months of her life, when her career as an opponent of the Alliance and the Cosmos Arm had been nearing a second apex. It was one of the few that had been taken of her then in which she was not holding her child.

He had requested it as such.

"_What are you looking for, Takeru_?"

_Odin's inquisitive words, a raised eyebrow as he looked up from the document he was reading. _

_Heero had stopped rummaging through the stack of papers that lay on the desk. "Nothing."_

_Odin set the document aside and waited. They were the last two in the Vólos base then; all others had already departed for the evening, having no desire to spend another night there. _

_He at last, under Odin's scrutiny, returned to his search, moving aside reports and data that would never again be used. After several minutes he had found what he was looking for. _

_He picked up the newspaper clipping, studying it in silence. Odin said not a word as he watched, not bothering to conceal the vague smile that crossed his face. _

_Her face had been radiant in the picture above the words that now had no meaning to him, her eyes dark and serene and yet strangely warm, filled with the light of some strange faith that knew only her devotion. She was smiling, not at the camera but at something far beyond it, and the afternoon sunlight shone brightly upon the gloss of her black hair, granting her appearance the illumination of an Eastern goddess. Her husband stood several feet away from her, looking back at her over his shoulder, and at her side she held the hand of her young son, a grinning boy of his mother's face and strange blue eyes. _

_Beneath the photograph the caption read simply 'Hanasaki Sakura.' _

_He had expected Odin to laugh or to taunt him with his sudden interest in the photograph of his mother, but no sound came from him. At the moment they understood each other too much to speak. _

_He tried to look at her, to study her enigmatic face, to remember it that way and not as it had been the last time he had seen her, contorted by pain and the peace of oncoming death, but his eyes were inevitably drawn back to the boy, the child that would grow into this damned shell of a human. _

_He looked up at Odin, forced himself to sound calm. _Please understand this._ "Do you have one that…" His voice trailed into silence; his gaze fell to the floor. _

_Odin waited, and when Heero did not continue he merely nodded and went to the desk, opened the drawer beneath it. Everything associated with the war had already been discarded; there remained only the photographs of her, the newspaper articles, a single report on her that had once been part of the Cosmos Arm's files. _

_He withdrew a smaller picture of her, handed it without hesitation to him. All this was done entirely in silence. _

_She was alone in this photograph, dressed completely in white with her hands folded in front of her. Her hair was tied at the nape of her neck, revealing her face as she turned to look at something in the distance. Her expression was calm and solemn, and without the light of the sun her eyes seemed as two dark pools of oil, glistening as though from some light within them rather than without. The kimono she wore drew tight about her small figure, and as he studied her he realized for the first time how frail a woman she should have been. _

"_She was very…" he began, foolishly believing that he would be able to say this and failing horribly. _

_Odin nodded contemplatively. "She was." _

_He looked up at the man, fought the urge to plead, fought the quiver that tried to invade upon his voice. "May I have it," he said finally, too calmly to sound uncaring. _

_No hesitation, no interrogation. "Of course, Takeru."_

For the first time in his life he had been grateful for Odin's strange understanding of him.

He looked at the photograph now, studied the serenity of her face. He tried not to think of the fact that she meant nothing and everything to him at once. Part of him strangely believed that she would want him to think of her that way.

Odin would soon be the only one whose memory of her persisted. The world had already buried her, he would bury her now, and then when Odin did the same she would at last be truly dead, forgotten by a world that forgot even its most vital leaders. She would attain the same insignificance that he had in the past so longed for.

The world and space were already forgetting Heero Yuy. Sakura was nothing to them.

He ran one finger over the line of her face, not entirely aware that he was doing so. On some level he wondered what it was she stared at so intently.

Enough of this. He had not come here to ponder Sakura's photograph or to force himself to remember her; he had come to bury her before he buried himself, the last victim of war.

He folded the picture, concealing her calm face. He would never see it again. _Please, God, he would never have to see it again._

"Goodbye, Sakura."

The wind whispered its own farewell.

Without a further thought he extended his arm and dropped the photograph, watched until it lighted upon the water's surface. It floated for several minutes, swaying over the smooth waves, then at last was swallowed and carried down into the cobalt darkness, where it passed out of sight.

_Tenshi-san._

He shuddered, swallowed. He felt his eyes close although he did not know why they did.

_What will you, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?_

Indeed, what would he do? There was nothing else but this.

He cast another fleeting glance at the sun and the sky and the unmarked graves, then rose and leapt over the edge.

The expression that graced his face in the moment before the chill and the dark consumed him was strangely almost that of a smile.

**

* * *

****A/N:** Forgive typos. As I said, I wrote this a few years ago, and I don't really have time to read over it thoroughly again at the moment. Any seeming-anomalies/anachronisms/crap like that are explained in the Author's Notes to Ballad. Yay. :) Oh wow... since this website is apparently no longer allowing author's notes... grumbles... please leave your email address in your comments and I promise to respond. 


	2. Chapter 2: Malespina's Bride

Remnants: 2

Some notes: "Malespina's bride" and the first sentence from John Davidson's "A Ballad of Hell," but since if anyone actually reads this they are familiar with "A Ballad of War" and are probably sick to death of me using the poem so much that they recognized that.

Malespina's Bride

She waited, shuddering, in her room. They said the boy had been dead for several days, that already his flesh had begun its ruination from the exposure to the corrosive salt of the ocean and a few of the tinier creatures that lived therein. He had probably washed up on shore early that morning, aided to his rest by the first rays of dawn. God only knew exactly how long he had been floating before the tide had guided him there.

The body had yet to be identified. Two officials from the palace, aware of what this could mean to her, were waiting for her now to come pronounce whether or not it was who, already suspecting it in the darker recesses of her mind, she feared it would be.

It would be by the sea where he had found his death that she would identify him. She had instructed that his body not be moved.

The clock ticked quietly against the wall beside her; it was the only thing that broke the horrid silence. It had been almost an hour since they had told her that a young male, obviously of strong Asian descent, had been found dead on the shore of the capital, less than a mile from the palace. She should have gone already, should have already looked upon the lifeless face and beheld his pitiful countenance, that face that she had once so loved to study, Heero's strange blue eyesY She should already have gone to perform this dreaded task, but she could not. She could not bring herself to rise from the bed. The only thing she could do, as the clock seemed to pronounce the nearing end of her life, was lie there as a crumpled doll and see his face, hear the eerie monotone of his voice. She could still taste his lips, still feel them pressed against her own. _Heero. You would do this, wouldn__t you? You would do this hopeless thing._

She could almost hear his voice now answering: "yes."

A knock came one the door, slowly and almost pensively, as though the one who had come to summon her did not want to. She flinched and tried to ignore it.

"Miss Relena?" Pagan's gentle voice, the words touched by just the slightest polite smile. Perhaps he had already seen the body and identified it, in his own mind, as Heero's.

She looked up at the door, swallowed the knot that had risen in her throat. "Yes, Pagan?"

"Forgive me, Miss Relena, but they wish you to come down to the shore now. They cannot wait there with the body much longer."

AOf course, Pagan.

_I cannot do this, please, I cannot do this, I will not__C_

She gathered the billowing skirt of the white dress around her, stood up from the bed. "You would not have done this for me, would you, Heero?"

The ticking of the clock and Pagans silent patience were the only responses.

She walked slowly toward the door, sighed heavily. The weight of her breath physically overwhelmed her, and she felt as though she would soon need stop lest her heart give out from the pressure.

Her hands trembled furiously at her sides and she clasped them behind her to stop them. She could not seem so nervous. She would do this with dignity; he would have wanted that of her.

She did not think as she left the sanctuary of her chambers. She did not think as Pagan, holding her arm to guide her, escorted her throughout the wide corridors of the palace. She did not think as she stepped into the sun outside, as they crossed the grounds to the shore. She could not think. Not without seeing his face again, without accepting the horrible knowledge that he had at long last done this to himself.

She would never be able to see him again after this. How foolish of her to have thought that she would.

The sea ahead was calm and still, just as it had been for the past few days. She wondered if it had been so calm when he had gone into it, if it had accepted him so lovingly. She hoped that it had.

She saw them long before she reached them, the two men in the regal uniform of the advisors to the Sanq Kingdom, and at their feet the limp body, too far away still for her to see its face. He seemed, from this distance, as an offering to the two statues of men, a shell sacrificed to a purpose beyond understanding.

Wasn't that what Heero was, after all? Someone who had, long before she had even known him, given up his soul to something only he understood?

Pagans gloved hand tightened on the back of her arm as they reached the shore, steadying her and simultaneously offering her an inadequate comfort. She was silently grateful for this.

"We are sorry for having to ask this of you, Your Highness," one of the advisors said. He met her eyes sadly, imparting the grim epiphany that she no longer needed. "But we thought it might be best if you—"

"Thank you," she muttered quietly. She stepped away from Pagan, wordlessly went to the drenched corpse. The two advisors stepped back, not wanting to intrude upon her grief.

She knelt at his side, lowered her eyes so that she could not see him. _Heero__Y_

"Your Highness, please, we need—"

She held up her hand, silenced him before he could finish. The boy's face could scarce be seen for his damp, matted hair; she brushed this aside slowly, looking away still.

_I cannot do this. _

With another sigh she turned her eyes to him, clutching the lock of hair tightly as though her grip on it was the only thing preventing her from rising to her feet and running in her cowardice. Her heart throbbed between her ears, filling her mind even as his terrible visage filled her eyes.

_I cannot, this is not true, I will not__C_

AMy God, she breathed, closing her eyes against the sight of his ruined face. Her hand fell weakly away from him; the knot that had formed in her throat sank to her chest. For a brief moment she thought she would faint.

His skin was utterly white know, cold with a chill that no amount of time in the sun could warm. His lips were parted in an expression of peaceful surrender, as though in his last moments he had forgotten his life completely. One of his eyes was missing; the other was half-lidded and shadowed, the light of his vitality having been extinguished.

The eye was dark, almost black now. Heeros eyes had been blue, the unmistakable color of the ocean after a storm.

"It's not him," she said, repressing the smile of relief that threatened to cross her face. "It's not Heero."

The sun beat down upon them all, the living and the nameless dead, as finally the Queen began to weep.

7


	3. Chapter 3: Christen

Another note: I wrote this pretty much five years ago with a different word program. My current program will not recognize certain punctuation marks so I can't do a "find and replace" to correct them, so I have to go through each chapter and manually replace every apostrophe and quotation mark. So do forgive me if an occasional weird symbol or letter appears where a mark should be, or no mark of punctuation appears in a possessive—I can't spot them all. On another note, I've realized this story is so old that I don't actually remember what happened in it. Therefore, if you have any questions about a character or event, please refer to them specifically so I don't have to read the entire friggin' thing again.

Also, in case you're interested, I noticed when I was replacing punctuation marks that there tends to be a lot of Aphrodite in this one (you'll remember her from Ballad—crazy redheaded girl). I'd always intended to make Heero and Aphrodite a weird mentally unstable couple and never got around to it.

Remnants: 3

Christen

He shielded his eyes from the sun and kept walking, heedless of those who looked at him and wondered who he was. He found it almost ironic that when around only a few no one paid him any notice, but here in this crowd he drew attention. Perhaps it was only because he did not blend in with the light atmosphere of the place.

A year ago it had been here that one of Treize's operatives had located and begun to follow him, in this city with its heavy crowds and musical tongues that he did not truly understand. It would not be so hard to do it again.

But there was no one to do it now, no enemy stalker with orders to kill him, no ghost of a man long believed dead to rise from the grave with a new mission for him. He had always been alone, regardless of where he went, but now there was no one to follow him in his solitude, and no one to wait for him to accomplish whatever they had given him. He was nothing now, an anonymity as in the past he had never truly been allowed to be.

He was beginning to feel more and more each day that he was nearing some great epiphany, whether it be his next purpose or his utter lack of one.

The sun started to descend over the Spanish coast; it would be night by the time he reached his destination. This did not disturb him. Had he lost his eyes, he could still have found his way there easily.

Two weeks had passed since he had finally left Greece, after having discarded the one thing he had carried with him since the war had ended, the accursed photograph of the woman as she stood in an almost pious contemplation as though unaware of the camera fixated on her. Two weeks, and still he found himself reaching for it in the pocket of his pants or in the jacket he occasionally wore despite the summer heat. Three nights ago he had awakened from a dream that even now he could not remember with no frantic thought but to find it, and it was only when he was unable to that he remembered what had happened to it. He could not explain this strange behavior; he could not rationalize it. He was not sure that he wanted to.

The only thing he could do until the damned situation came to an end was simply not think about it.

Such a grand ritual he had made of this.

He had spent the first days since his departure near the Grecian coast, first on the island of Crete, then eastward on Cyprus. He had considered continuing east, traveling through the heat of the southern deserts until he reached India and from there China, and then from there returning at long last to Japan. He could be a lifeless husk there just as well as he could anywhere else. Perhaps there he would even gain the same anonymity he had sought all his life. The strangely blue eyes of Takeru Hanasaki had long been forgotten, just as had been the woman who was, in some distant life too long ago to matter, his mother. The idea had appealed to him as nothing else did.

Perhaps later, after this mission was accomplished, he would go through with it. Perhaps he would have the courage to do it then.

It had been more than a year since he had been in Spain, among its jovial people with their quick-spoken words and their laughter that seemed to carry for miles. He had almost forgotten how it seemed that the later the hour grew the more people could be found in the streets, each fulfilling their own meager purposes. After several minutes of being within the city he, almost by unconscious gesture, out of habit made himself less conspicuous, and began to mesh into the crowd. His stiff upper body relaxed, his shoulders fell back and his posture loosened; he began to walk more slowly, more leisurely, as though he too were merely one of them. His Asian face set him apart still, but not so much that he could still be easily noticed.

It was this same method of gradually infiltrating and becoming part of a crowd that had caused the operative in question to lose him.

He found himself, though not by intention, vaguely searching in the faces of those he passed for the feline features of Dorothy Catalonia, though he did know for certain that this was indeed the city to which she had moved after Quatre hadCin what was proclaimed a miracleCawoken and recovered after spending nearly a year in a coma. He had barely known her, and yet once or twice he thought he saw her, once even on the arm of a boy who quite resembled Quatre, who truly favored the people of this country more than he did those of the Arab nations of which he was descended. What would he do if he did indeed find her? Stop her, perhaps say something of petty triviality to her? Would he merely nod his head in greeting and go on, having been made from one moment all the more content in that they had seen and recognized each other? Or would he merely attempt to escape her notice, hiding almost abashedly from even the slightest memory of his war-torn past?

The war was over. All of those wars were over. Each one who had had a hand in either their creation or their endings had now gone on with their lives, with no thought of those they had known and with whom they had fought. Ironic that he should be the one who, even now, saw their faces, granted them more than just a fleeting thought.

Of the others who had at one time been Gundam pilots he knew little or nothing. Quatre had returned to Spain with Dorothy, and there had been rumors that he would now focus his efforts with his corporation there. Trowa had stayed on the colony on Mars, and construction to complete the colony was now underway. Perhaps he had finally joined the Prevention Organization, perhaps not. Perhaps since then he had returned to Earth, to his sister. Heero neither knew nor cared.

Of the other two pilots, Duo Maxwell and Chang Wufei, he knew nothing.

The same was true of all those with whom he had had contact in the last war. Relena had returned to her throne, and only recently she had begun plans for a new economic treaty with the colonies. Perhaps she had finally learned how to be the Queen and not the foolish young girl. Zechs, like many, had disappeared shortly after the war's end, taking with him the former Lieutenant Lucrezia Noin. Rumors had circulated that Miss Noin had, within the past year, given birth to their son. The young woman Heero had met outside the Spanish base, Marguerite, he supposed had returned to France. He truly was the last one to leave all of this behind.

His departure was long overdue.

A guitar played somewhere in the distance, quick high notes at too slow a pace, a type of music that made sense only in this country. It mingled strangely with the voices that surrounded him, acted as a score for this drama that was becoming too old far too quickly. The crowd began as a whole, either consciously or not, walking to its rhythm, and never was a step lost. A woman far to his right released the hand of her young children and began dancing, her long full skirt swaying about her slender legs in a scarlet plume. Her children laughed and joined her, emulating the movements of her hips and the lightness of her feet. They were perfect images of their mother, darker of skin and of hair, of blatant African or perhaps Central American descent, and in that perfection, they were beautiful. Did one of them perhaps have blue eyes, either from their Spanish lineage or something more inexplicable than that?

The woman laughed loudly as a young girl, only slightly older than her sons, broke apart from her own mother and joined them, displaying her bare legs beneath her white shift of a dress. Others stopped to watch this scene, and as the music quickened another guitar began to play, coming from the direction opposite the first, and standing over a rooftop overlooking it all a young man lifted a flute to his lips. The three separate sounds intertwined perfectly, and soon the dark-haired woman and the three children were not the only ones dancing. Even many of those who did not dance stopped to watch them.

To Heero the music sounded not like a spontaneous symphony of this life that existed beyond warfare but rather like the Dies Irae, sung by beautiful voices but nonetheless tremulous with the terror of divine judgment. He let his eyes look upon the scene only a moment longer and tried to resume his stiffened walk through this crowd but there were too many people, stopped in the streets, laughing and clapping, swaying and twirling, so many that their voices seemed a shriek, a torrent of screams against the merciless evening sun. Mouths open in laughter became faces contorted in fear and outrage and smiles seemed leers of sadistic inspiration, and behind it all the strings hummed what was to his ears a death march and the flute a voice of floating mockery, a simultaneous cry of pain. He closed his eyes against it, shook his head rapidly as though the swift action would drive these thoughts from it. Someone brushed past him, briefly touched his shoulder. He flinched away and pulled back from the crowd, stepping into a middle-aged woman. He sought a vague apology but his tongue could find none, and as she merely laughed at his solemnity he bolted, locating at last a break in the crowd, dashing through it as though the mercenaries of hell itself were given in pursuit, upon orders to return him to the torment he had found under the custody of Dekim Barton. A few cried out as he pushed through them, a few laughed at the boy who ran as though crazed through their scene of unexplained merriment. He did not care, so long as he escaped them. He did not care.

He did not stop running until he had reached the city's edge. Sweat poured down his face in cold rivulets, burning his eyes, matting his hair to his forehead and pasting his shirt to his back. He could hear the sound of his gasping breath above the rush of blood in his ears, uneven, ragged, more like the final respirations of one on his deathbed than one fully alive. His lips were dry and cracked, and as he ran his parched tongue over them he caught the faintest taste of blood.

He wiped the sweat away from his mouth, winced as he felt something much thicker than perspiration above his upper lip. His hand came away red, stained with more blood than could have come from his cut lips. He touched the flesh beneath his nostrils, studied the blood upon his fingertip. His nose was bleeding.

Another drop of blood fell, as though to confirm this, from his left nostril, pooling between his lips. He spit it away and resumed walking, holding a hand beneath his nose to prevent the blood from dripping down his face.

The music no longer reached his ears, nor did the raucous laughter of any grand crowd. He realized that he hadn't been able to hear it for several minutes. He was well away from the heart of the city now, miles from any such gathering. These outskirts were all but completely devoid of people.

He paused to take in his surroundings, feeling almost unnerved by where he was. It had seemed that he ran for only a few minutes and yet there were miles between where he had begun and here, miles that he had no memory of running.

He wiped the fresh blood away and kept walking. How he had gotten there without realizing it did not matter.

He would be nearing the familiar coastal town soon, once he had passed through this void of dust and silent decadence. Perhaps the moisture in the air by the sea would soothe the parched rasp of this throat.

He looked over his shoulder frequently as he walked, though he had no need to anymore. He had never needed to, even when he was being followed. He had always lost the auburn-haired girl by the time he had reached this point on his way to the base.

His thoughts turned to her now, as they did sometimes when in Greece he had believed he heard her footsteps behind him, the all too familiar pattern of her discreet walk. He had briefly grown accustomed to it in the war, the constant sound of someone mirroring his every footstep. Perhaps that was why he found such solace in imagining that he heard them now.

A redheaded child with a dog named Mary, a redheaded girl named Aphrodite. Both of their deaths haunted him in his weaker moments. Both of their deaths had come by his hands.

Aphrodite was a year into her grave now. Her body had been placed, after being located in the chapel on the grounds of Treize's primary base, with that of Treize Khushrenada until it was identified, not by a member of the girl's own family but by one of her former fellow operatives under Treize's command. She was given a funeral mass, more Grecian in form than Roman Catholic, and was buried on the grounds of the church in which she had found her death.

He had learned much about her since her body was committed to the ground, not truly by choice but because he felt that he should; he could not explain this, not even to himself. She had been the daughter of a Grecian dignitary, the last child born into a family of Alliance supporters of high militaristic repute. Her grandfather had been a general under the Cosmos Arm; her father had in turn gained this title, long before she was born. Her mother she had never known. It was believed that Aphrodite had been the product of an illicit affair outside the bonds of marriage between the General and a woman of a lower class, and that upon learning of the birth of his illegitimate child, he had discreetly usurped legal rights over the infant, forcing the nameless mother to remain quiet. Perhaps she had been killed, either by him or someone working beneath him. Either way, the mother of the girl was never known.

She had lived with her father on the colonies for a while, then at last they came back to Earth, after he was relocated to the Arm's branch there. Her father was one of those who had been assigned to the case of Sakura Hanasaki when she became considered a true threat to the Alliance; he had been one of those personally dispatched to bring her into the Arm's custody alive and unharmed, or, if that could not be done, to kill her with as many of her followers as possible. He was distinctly seen and identified on the day of her husbands death; he was seen again during the next assault on the protestors, this time firing shots directly at her and her young son but missing in all the hysteria that followed.

He himself was murdered a month later, in his home, following a conference with the heads of the Alliance. It was determined that one of Sakura's supporters, utterly enraged by her death, had infiltrated the conference dressed as an attendant and afterward followed him back to his estate, where he was killed by one who claimed to have done so in Sakura's name.

_Takeru Hanasaki. Your mother is a whore._

How disappointed Sakura would have been to learn of this.

Aphrodite had been taken in as a ward of the Arm, after refusing to reside on the colonies with her grandfather. She had been trained in the arts of warfare and aristocracy in their custody.

In all the time that she was monitored by them, there was never any report of the slightest mental illness. And yet there were distinct gaps in certain sections of her reports, unexplained mentionings of "conflicts" with other students whose own reports seemed to have disappeared, strange lapses in time involving her military actions, conduct reports that were too vague to have been anything other than falsified. Why those things, which could have done harm to the Alliance, were covered up he did not know, but such things were irrelevant.

She left the main branch of the Alliance and transferred to OZ as Treize Khushrenada began his ascent to power, then promptly disappeared after his supposed death in AC 195. When Treizes clandestine organization was still in infancy she resurfaced, and when it was learned that the son of Sakura Hanasaki was reported to be working for their enemy in Spain she was given the order by Treize himself to follow him, causing him no serious harm until she was told to kill him. She did not dispute these orders.

Heero knew nothing about her beyond that.

She truly did haunt him now, as brutally as did the small girl he had never meant to kill. On some rare occasions he saw her face, feline and lovely, eyes illuminated by an insane amusement in all the world around her. He sometimes wondered what it was that had so ruined her mind. Was it the death of her father, his gruesome murder in their home, as she slept in the calm of the night? Was it the years of the brutal regiment of the Arm that had robbed her of her sanity? Or was it something long before any of these, something that happened in her mother's womb or as the first glimpse of light touched her newborn eyes?

He suspected that it had been all of those things, ultimately.

He had not hated her. Even when he had been forced to kill her, he had not been able to hate her, just as he had never been able to hate anyone but Dekim Barton, whom even Sakura had despised. Had he ever really wanted to kill her? Yes. No. He had had no choice.

But he _had _had a choice, and thus for her murder as well as a thousand others he would seek out hell willingly when he died, if it even existed.

His clearest image of her was from that night. He still saw her wearing that dress, the white gown of the tight skirt and the open chest that had made her seem a succubus and an assassin in one; he still saw the strange, unnerving expression on her face as she sat before the piano, her slender fingers flying over the keys effortlessly. She had not made the instrument sing; it had sung to her, merely inspired by her touch.

He still saw her, whenever he thought of her, holding the dagger with which she had meant to kill him, the dagger he had driven into her chest as she struggled against him.

_I think that I will drink your blood once I've killed you._

Would she have, had he not at the right moment overpowered her? Would she have knelt over his dying body and licked the blood from his wounds? He did not doubt her threat. Even now as he thought about her, he could feel the pull of the bloodied fabric against his chest as she unbuttoned the shirt he had worn that night, saw her mindless smile as she leaned over to lap at the mortal cut. She would have, and even that would not have disturbed him. He would have died in her embrace just as she had died in his.

_You would have to give it to me then._

His strength, his soul, his vitality, his mindYhe gave them all to her now in thinking of her.

She had asked him then, in more eloquent terms, if he had ever slept with someone before he had killed them, offering, proposing, threatening to do it to him as he had lain beneath her, injured and bleeding, at the moment unable to move. He remembered how utterly inhuman she had sounded as she spoke, driving her knees into his chest as she straddled his waist. She moved down, pushing her hips against his. He had not remembered this until later that night. He could not have remembered. She pushed her hips against his, spread her legs fully over him, pressed herself against him. Her half-bared breasts, not yet marred by the sight of the dagger impaled between them, heaved as she gauged the potential of what she could do to him.

It was only then, only at that moment, that he had been afraid of her. It was only when she brushed her heated center against him, proving that she indeed had every intention of doing all that she said, that he had realized how far lost was her mind, and only then that he had felt any fear of her.

He had gathered the strength to push her off of him then, sending the weapon from her hand into the floor, sending the back of her head into the base of a statue of the Blessed Virgin. He had believed her dead for several minutes. Pity that she had not been. Such a quick, peaceful death that would have been, so bloodless.

He had had to rip pieces of flesh from her body to kill her. She was completely scored with cuts before she died, not an inch of her flesh left unmarked. One of her arms had been gouged to the bone, the flesh ripped away to expose the muscle beneath. Her throat, too, had been cut but not deeply enough to disable her, and even as she advanced upon him again he had plunged the blade into her chest, crushing the plate of bone, driving its shards into her heart.

He remembered the sight of her blood upon his hands, on the statue that had watched her violent death. He remembered the sudden childish sanity that had flooded her weeping eyes as she begged him not to leave her to die alone.

He had never committed so personal a murder; he never had since. He had vowed, just as he had after the Mariemaia incident, that he would never again.

_You would have to give it to me then._

_Are you lost?_

_I think, Takeru, that I will drink your blood once I've killed you._

_I said are you lost?_

_You would have to give it to me then._

_I've been lost ever since the day I was born. _

_That's so sad. I'm not lost at all. I'm taking Mary out for a walk. _

_My name is Aphrodite Delankos. Remember that when I receive orders to kill you. _

_Yes, deranged heart, I will remember it always._

He could have spared them both.

What had been worse, the sight of the childs body, murdered not by the Arm but by his own mistake? Or the feel of her blood upon his hands as he drove the blade down again, rending her flesh? The child's innocent words as she gave to him the flower, or Aphrodites sane plea that he not leave her to die alone? Were they not both his own sins?

He pushed her from his mind just as forcefully as he had pushed her away from him in the chapel. She, too, would be buried soon enough. She had to be.

_How many times must I kill that girl and her dog?_

How many times indeed. The child he could not bury. He had given up in trying long ago. Perhaps this was his penance, that he should remember her always, that he should see her face and hear her sweetly inquisitive voice eternally until he was buried in the ash just as she had been, until he bled out into nothing as had Sakura. He would bury all of them but her.

_I've been lost ever since the day I was born._

He always would be.

His nose had stopped bleeding by the time the coast came into view, a thick line of sunlit blue over the horizon. He wiped the remainder of the blood from his upper lip, spitting the thick taste of it from his mouth.

_I think, Takeru, that I will drink your blood once I've killed you._

Irrelevance, all of it. Ironic that he had never had such vivid memories before this war. Ironic that before it there had been only the redheaded child to plague his memory and now there were so many others. Aphrodite. Odin. Sakura. Dekim. He would bury these all in time. Already he was putting Sakura out of mind and now he would do the same to Aphrodite. Odin would follow easily. Dekim would be the greatest challenge.

But he could not think of Dekim now. He was by far the least important thing to occupy his mind.

The coastal town was as dead and empty as it had been when he had last seen it a year ago. Most of the buildings that had been set up by the coast had been abandoned long before preparations for the war had begun; were no people there now, no one to see or to interrupt him. He was at last utterly alone.

No lights shone on the water's calm surface, no light save that of the setting sun. If any unseen person had taken up residence here, they did it in darkness. He watched the sea as he approached it, listened only to the lull of the waves breaking quietly upon the shore. It was almost as inviting as the sea in Greece had been, where he had destroyed his only real reminder of Sakura's existence. That sea had not been able to cleanse the blood that covered him. This one would not either.

Enough of this. These were things that Zechs would think, the fallen prince who would gladly damn himself for the sake of alleviating his embittered guilt. They were no matter to him. He did not romanticize their deaths. He did not care that their blood stained him; his own did as well. Cleansing it would only be a waste of time.

He thought bemusedly of how Odin would laugh to hear him say such a thing, how Zechs would merely scoff. He himself would, having heard it from someone else.

He walked slowly to the shore, knelt upon the damp sand. The light waves rose slowly to him, surrounding him, for a brief moment, with a babbling layer of salted foam. A single bubble blew out as the water receded, rising upward and breaking at last upon the tip of his nose.

He winced and backed away, rubbing furiously at the spot the bubbled had touched.

_Kneeling on the shore of the lake, letting the sand dig into his bared knees, relishing the feel of the hem of his black robes floating on the wind around him. The gold buttons of the robe glared in the sunlight, blinding him each time he glanced down at them in childish fascination. The water was cold despite the summer heat, the darkest blue as though existing beneath it was not earth but a great abyss. The shadow of the mountain rippled placidly on the water, not an ominous figure but rather one of intrigue. They would be climbing the mountain soon, walking up the path that made it seem not half as steep as it appeared from father away. They would have to go home soon. His mother never stayed below the mountain for very many days. _

_He moved closer to the water's edge. It was utterly quiet here, as it always seemed to be following one of the demonstrations. Sakura never failed to retreat immediately from the shouts and screams and cacophonous cheers into the near-silent peace that existed beyond the cities. Perhaps it was truly a sign of her own weakness. _

No matter. He was not yet the young man who thought about these things so cynically; he did not yet see the raven-haired woman who watched him from farther away on the shore as merely Sakura. She was his mother then, and he was her only son.

_He turned around, looked back at his mother, grinning widely. Her calm lips pulled up into a smile and she raised a single hand to him. He returned the wave and continued to watch her from the corner of his eye. He did this often, though he suspected she was always aware of it. He himself was not aware, in turn, that since he had begun to do this he had started to emulate her, replicating her graceful movements, her enigmatic facial expressions. He would have only the barest awareness of it years later. _

_She lay upon the ground where the forests that surrounded the lake gave way to sand, resting her head upon her hand. Her feet were bare and when she had lain down her white kimono had drawn up above her knees, exposing her slender legs. It was only after a demonstration, once she had finally escaped the crowd, that she showed such abandonment. Perhaps she was not even aware of it. _

_Odin sat beside her, seeming as though he was watching the lake while discreetly watching her. Sakura probably noticed this; Takeru doubted that it disturbed her. She always seemed to like his attention. _

These memories were useless now.

_His father was not with them. He was rarely ever with them after one of the demonstrations, remaining there with their followers instead of departing early with his wife, preferring the crowds to this. Takeru did not yet find it strange that Odin accompanied his mother when his father did not. He was almost more accustomed to seeing Odin with Sakura than his father. _

_Sakura glanced at her son, narrowing her large almond eyes in the sunlight. He stifled a laugh as he pretended that he was occupied with the lake rather than watching her. After a moment, convinced that he was paying her no attention, she raised up, laid her head upon Odin__s thigh. He did not seem surprised by this; indeed, rather than express shock over Sakura moving so close to him, as even her husband would have been, he merely smiled and took one of her small hands in his, bringing it to his lips and kissing it softly. _

_Takeru giggled under his breath and turned fully away. He did not, at his age, understand the implications of the scene he had just witnessed; he did not believe he had seen anything scandalous. He merely laughed as a child would, not comprehending, not suspecting. He had no reason to. _

_He returned his eyes to the water, forgetting for the moment his mother and the man in whose company she could only too often be found. It was only then that he noticed his reflection upon the water, the calmly smiling face of an Asian boy with his mother__s expression, with blue eyes rather than dark ones. He grinned at the boy, laughed quietly as the boy smiled back. He wrinkled his nose, winked at his reflection. He heard his mother__s voice behind him, quiet and calm. She was speaking to Odin, not to him. She wouldn't notice this. _

_He leaned over the water, edging closer to the silent reflection. Beyond it he could see the bottom of the lake, dark and yet clear, and as he stared at it, almost mesmerized, he did not realize how close his face was to the water. He leaned in closer and cried out as he felt something cold touch his nose. He raised a hand to wipe it away and in doing so lost his balance, falling headfirst into the pool. _

_His arms flapped spastically, bringing him immediately afloat. He surfaced laughing, spitting, and even as Sakura rose to go to him he kicked away from the shore, giggling like a child who would never know any pain. _

He shuddered, closed his eyes against the image as though doing so would drive it and all the others from his head. He did not need to remember these things. He did not want to. _He did not want to._

_What will you do, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?_

He would never know that. Nothing would disturb him any longer when he was at last mercifully dead, not until then.

Mercifully dead. Was that what they all were now, "mercifully" dead? Was it indeed an act of mercy? He didn't believe in heaven, in a plane existing beyond this one that offered nothing but eternal peace. There _was _no existence in eternal peace. Nor did he believe in any hell. Was it truly peace they had found in the moment after their deaths? Was the red-haired child at peace now, safe from any further pain that life might have caused her? Had Sakura at last found the enlightenment she had so desperately sought? Was Aphrodite now safe from her own delusions, and Dekim Barton fully absolved?

Enough. This was not mercy, not for any of them, not truly. Mercy had been his mothers face at the moment of her death, the exact moment that she had ceased to feel the pain of the bleeding wounds that riddled her body and had given in to the silence of death. Mercy was her strength at last yielding to the fragility that she should have been born with, the frailty that should have been all that her slender frame could possess. Mercy was the child giving him the flower as he merely stared at her; it was dying in her sleep rather than accursedly awake. Mercy was Aphrodite gaining some hint of sanity before she died, begging him not to leave her. It was Odin Lowe unable to find a life devoid of some purpose. _That_ was mercy. Death would be nothing in comparison.

Mercy for him would be putting this whole thing to rest.

He dipped his hands into the foaming waves as they crested and flowed up the slope of the shore, rubbed at his flesh until the stain of the blood had faded completely. He splashed a handful of water upon his face, wincing as the salt burned his cracked lips. He could wash his own blood away easily enough; this should present no challenge.

He lingered on the shore until the sun sank below the horizon, bathing the decadent wasteland in a blue even darker than that of his own eyes.

Every place in which he ever found himself seemed to him a graveyard. This was no exception.

He rose from his silent crouch, dried his moistened hands on his loose shirt. Without further thought he walked away from the shore, leaving only his footprints upon the sand as a sign that he had once been there, voiceless echoes behind him.

The base loomed far ahead of him, a shadow that seemed to rise up from the sea itself, an empty corpse left by war, untouched since its grand battles close. The moon had yet to appear in the sky and the light of the stars was too meager to reach the earth tonight, shedding not even the slightest illumination upon its dreary form. It was as dead as all else around it, at long last silent where it had been the source of the clamor of hell itself the last time he had seen it. It was nothing more now than a monument to the war that had given it purpose.

He passed the harbor, the useless docks, the pier upon which he had first truly encountered the young redheaded woman with the saddened, pensive eyes and the scarred wrists. She had told him to jump from the pier's edge that night, had offered to hold his head under the water if he wished. He thought now that perhaps he should have done it. It truly had been his last opportunity to; it would not have mattered then. It almost did not matter now.

He entered the main building the way that he always had in the past, through a discreet door on the side, as though there were still need for such care. Odin would have been quite amused by this, he was certain. He himself found it of the least importance. Routine was the method of his life.

The doorCunlocked, as it had been since the day the final member of the counteroffensive had walked out of itCclosed behind him with a shrill but brief squeal, sealing him in the unbroken darkness. His hand fell calmly away from the latch as his eyes adjusted to the dark, though in it there was little to see. All but a few rooms had long been stripped, leaving not a single slip of paper or scrap of metal behind for dust to collect upon, and the corridors were unobstructed. He needed only remember the pattern of turns and stairwells to navigate his way through them.

This would pose no problem. It would not be the first time he had had to do it.

He stepped away from the door, began the long walk to the room through which he would pass to find the corridor that would take him, after he had passed through another staircase and hall, to the room he sought. He had never heard the base so silent. During the war there had always been the distant crashing of metal in the other faraway rooms, the low hum of machinery and conversational voices, and when even these constant sounds had temporarily ceased, waiting to be resumed the following day, there had been the quiet music that had poured from Yuan-Chen's office, never so loud that it could be heard clearly in the halls but still never so quietly that one could not pinpoint, after some consideration, what it was. The immortal Bach, the force of Beethoven, the symphonies that seemed written truthfully for war itself, for both the generals who rode victorious and those who sat in conferences with views of the Earth behind them, signing treaties they had only intentions of betraying, for the dead, trampled and burned. Sometimes there had even been the ballets of Tchaikovsky. There had been clashing and clattering and yelling and talking, there had been music centuries old that had endured where other, more modern kinds had been forgotten, but never had there been this silence.

He found it both unnerving and strangely comforting.

He proceeded down the corridor, not needing to follow the wall with his fingertips. After so many yards it curved to the left and he turned with it, realizing as he did that his eyes were closed. He briefly opened them and saw no difference.

He found Yuan-Chen's office as empty as the rest of the base. The lights had not been disconnected in the bases officious abandonment and, without the slightest thought as to where the switch was, he flicked on the soft overhead lamp, revealing the rooms utter emptiness, the walls that were now bare of tapestries and glaring screens, the floor now bare of the lush red carpet that had once covered it. The highly-polished desk was gone now, the velvet chairs, the luxurious furnishings that spoke purely of the extravagance of Europe. He had never found it odd that Yuan-Chen, a true practitioner of the arts and philosophy of Asia, had chosen such decorum more suited for an office in a French manor. It would always seem that he suited every situation too perfectly.

All of those things were long removed, and now, as he quietly surveyed the room, it seemed more truthful that they had never existed. Perhaps it was better this way.

He crossed the room, opened the opposite door and stepped into the hall, leaving the testament of emptiness behind him. He could now go in search of another.

He made his way silently into the next corridor, down the stairs that waited, covered in dust and lined by the webs of spiders that had inhabited it since its unceremonious abandonment. A spider, unseen in the dark, scurried across his arm. He flicked it away without the slightest sign of disgust.

Down into the darkness, into the cold silent, empty abyss that waited to be filled with his inillustrious presence. He thought that in a metaphoric way, he would never be able to rise from it again.

The subterranean halls were all empty, the rooms devoid of life or any signs thereof. He passed through the great room that had once under its unearthly lights held several units of mobile suits until the time that they were needed. All was dead and in no need of description.

At last he came to the room that had been his, the incessantly dark bunker that even when in the use had contained only the desk and the computer. It was unlocked now; there was no longer any need for security.

He opened the door, shivered only slightly as a rush of cold air from within the room chilled his face, then without another moment of hesitation he stepped inside. The air was frigid and stale from so many months of disuse. A large spider web hung from the far left corner of the ceiling, supporting the weight of a fat brown arachnid that seemed too large, too grotesque, to be natural. His vacant eyes studied it for a moment as it began to climb, startled at the sound of the door opening, toward the top of its web, where it could better watch him. Its obese body moved too gracefully for its size; it skeletal legs seemed to click as though made of metal. Strangely this almost caused him to shudder.

The room was exactly as had left it a year ago. The chair was firmly pushed in beneath the desk; the computer was perfectly placed at the desks center, its monitor tilted slightly to the right. Piles of assorted disks lay scattered haphazardly around it. Of course he had left all of them when he had been summoned to Vólos. Only one had been needed there.

It was exactly as he had left it, and yet strangely he felt that something was different. He surveyed the floor, the corners, the walls all under the dim light, and for too many seconds than he cared to admit he even studied the ceiling, looking for something, for anything that seemed different. He found nothing. Not even the dust upon the floor had been disturbed.

He started to go further into the room, stopped. His eyes fell again to the floor and for a moment his vision blurred; a searing pain flared in his head. For that one moment he could see this thought that so plagued his mind.

The pain faded, the abrupt memory faded. The spider was the only witness to his humiliation. He went to the middle of the room, still looking down at the floor. Behind him could be seen the tracks left by his own feet in the dust but nothing else. He wondered disdainfully if, were he to remove his shoes and step as lightly as he once had been able to, he could walk across the floor without leaving a mark.

Enough, enough. Enough of this. Enough of those damnable thoughts, these damnable questions spawned by the onslaught of too many memories and this damnable feeling that something was wrong here, not merely different but indeed wrong. Enough of it.

He went to the desk, meaning to take all that he had left there and to destroy it later. Immediately he saw that, though the floor was unmarred, the dust upon the table had been disturbed. Several lines ran wildly through it, long, slender lines like those that could be made by one's fingertips; farther to the left was clearly etched into the dust the partial shape of a palm. These prints were utterly clean, as though they had been made very recently.

He glanced wildly about the room, searching for some other sign that he was not the only one who had come here. There was nothing else. Nothing.

He realized that he had lost all desire to remain here much longer.

He picked up one of the stacks of disks, meaning to tuck them into a coat pocket, and stopped. Beneath it, surrounded by a neat row of fingerprints, lay a folded slip of paper pressed into a tiny square.

He touched it slowly, took it between his fingers as though the feel of it revolted him. His hand trembled as he began to unfold it; he gave this no attention.

Its edges were frayed and straight, as though it had been ripped with much patience and consideration. Across it were written five simple words, written in black ink, narrow, flowing, elegant as the penmanship typical of Europe in a far more distant century.

_The assassin waits in Rome._

So blunt, this message, requiring no contemplation to decipher its meaning.

_The assassin waits in Rome._

He did not recognize the writingCit was altogether alien to him and completely unlike that of any whom might have written and left it for him to find, any that knew he would after all this time return here for this purpose. None of this disturbed him. He did not care at this moment who had written the message or with what motive; indeed part of him did not want to know.

His throat closed in a subconscious attempt to swallow; his chest throbbed as his lungs tried futilely to draw breath. A cold bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face.

At last he breathed, taking in the chilled stale air in one explosive gasp. His chest heaved as though it would soon burst and his vision blurred, darkening until he could no longer read the words that marred the white slip. The message fell from his trembling hand, landing on the dusty floor as an injured dove.

_What will you do, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?_

_The assassin waits in Rome._

The war is over, the war is over, the war is over, the war isC 

He turned and fled the room, leaving behind all that he had come to retrieve. He would never return there again.

21


	4. Chapter 4: The Assassin

Remnants: 4

Remnants: 4

awaken, my love

The Assassin

Their voices soared higher, filling the church in their sweet resonance, giving pause to every quiet conversation and for a moment causing all who heard them to glance in their direction. The boys' faces were placid, indifferent, and yet from their peaceful mouths proceeded the most glorious note, the very song of all heaven, tremulous in it strength and yet tumultuous in its piercing beauty. They themselves seemed all but completely unaware of this, as though the sound came not _from_ them but _through_ them, and they were merely vessels for it.

He watched them a moment longer, then lifting the case he proceeded into the church and to the pews. In the third from the back he took a seat, gathering the case up to set it beside him. The weight of it did not betray its true contents, for what lay inside it was as light as the instrument it was intended to hold.

Another man sat to his left, a slightly older man of graying hair and sorrowful dark eyes and above his thin worked lips a small gray mustache that gave him all the appearance of an impoverished artisan from a fairy tale. A second case, identical to his own, sat on the floor between his knees and nervously he clasped it, as his large aged eyes studied the man who had just sat beside him.

"You are Odin Lowe?" he said after a moment, once the boys at the front of the church, guided by their instructor's hands, had begun a new song.

The dark-haired man gave a slight nod. "Good evening, Signor Moreschi."

A quiet sigh escaped Moreschi's lips and he managed a cordial smile. "I trust there were no difficulties in fulfilling my request?" His low, trembling voice betrayed his fear, his apprehension. He cleared his throat in a futile attempt to regain his composure.

"There were none," Odin replied, laying one hand upon the case he held. "And I see that you had no trouble in procuring my payment."

Moreschi shook his head and forced another weak smile. "It was the least I could do, although I still beg you, Signor, to consider accepting my money as well as this."

"I have already considered it and have rejected the idea. I have no use for your money, Signor. I only ask this of you because I know you are willing to part with it. That is, if you still are."

Moreschi's face brightened with a genuine smile. "Of course. It has been in my family for ages, but we are none of us musically inclined, save for my son, and his talent is not in his hands but in his voice." He paused and looked at the young choir. "That one," he said, gesturing at a boy on the second row, with thick dark hair and the face of a cherub, "is my son."

Odin turned his gaze toward the boy and gave an understanding smile. "He is a beautiful child."

Moreschi nodded proudly. "He has his mother's eyes." A bittersweet smile touched the corners of his mouth and his eyes filled with tears. "She would be so proud, if she could see him now."

"Perhaps she can, Signor Moreschi."

The boy went on with the others, unaware of his father's actions.

Moreschi turned back to him and smiled. "I would like to believe that, Signor. I would."

Odin favored with him a commiserating expression and briefly touched the back of his hand. "You have done very well with him and I am sure she is proud of you as well." He picked up the case and, beneath the shield of the pew in front of them, presented it to Moreschi. "If you would like to examine it, to be sure it is to your specifications, I would advise you to do it here. We are not being watched, but that cannot be guaranteed elsewhere."

Moreschi nodded and reluctantly took the case, then motioned at the one belonging to him.

Odin shook his head. "I will not accept my payment unless you are pleased with it."

Another nod, a hesitating glance at what he had been given. He swallowed, cleared his throat again, and finally he unfastened the case, opening it slowly as one might the coffin of a body that has just been exhumed. His hands trembled upon the object inside it and carefully he lifted it, holding it below the pew where even the flickering candlelight could not reach it.

The gun was smaller than the violin for which the case was designed, dark and cold and callous as any tool of murder must appear. Slowly he curled his quaking hand around it, caressing the trigger with his index finger but never feigning to pull it. The pained expression upon his face made it obvious that he would not be able to until the time came.

He looked at Odin, blinked back the fresh tears that welled in his eyes. "Is it—"

"Yes, it is loaded. I would advise that you familiarize yourself with it later tonight, once your son is asleep."

Moreschi merely nodded. His hand tightened upon it once more, and then quickly he returned it to its case, fastening the locks in all the resignation of a man forced to take these drastic measures.

"Is it what you wanted?"

"Yes." His voice was weak, almost a whisper. "It is more than that. I did not request the silencer."

"But nonetheless, I have over the years found them quite useful."

Moreschi's face became confused but he did not elaborate. "Thank you," he said finally. His voice quivered with another repressed sob. "I did not mean to trouble you with this affair. It's only that…I was told that you have dealt with these things before—"

"I have."

"And that you could be of very discreet assistance."

Again Odin smiled. "I am usually more discreet than this, but your situation will not allow us much time for such discretion."

"You have my deepest apologies, Signor."

"You have mine. And there is no need for you to apologize to me. You are not the first person who has consulted me on such a matter as this, and I fear you will not be the last."

Moreschi gave a grateful smile and nodded. He laid the case containing the gun aside and turned his eyes again to the boy. "I do not want to do this," he said. "If I were alone, I would not. But my son…I will not let them hurt him. By God, I will not."

Odin touched his hand again. "I will do all I can to ensure you and your son's safety."

Moreschi did not respond. At the head of the church a new song began, one of slow solemnity and pleading grace. The air itself seemed to pause to listen.

"My wife," he said after several minutes. "She always wanted to see him like this, to see him so happy. She died just after he was accepted into the choir.  
His soft voice became thick with something quite akin to bitterness.

"You have not talked about her death, have you? Not the truth of it."

"I have not. I tried…the man who referred me to you, I tried to explain it to him, but he said he did not require an explanation."

"Nor do I, Signor Moreschi. Sometimes it is not to others that we need to explain but to ourselves."

"True." He sat back against the pew, sighing heavily. For the longest time he seemed to be in almost pious contemplation, hands neatly folded upon his knees, eyes staring at the boy but not truly looking at him. His lips moved to speak once but he did nothing.

The song ended. The boys relaxed but remained in their lines, as the instructor began quietly to explain the nuances of the next piece. Moreschi's son appeared enthralled with every word he spoke, as though to learn perfectly this song would bring about the greatest epiphany of his life.

"He is so happy now," Moreschi said finally, smiling again in that way that only a devoted father could. "He still cries for her sometimes, but he has this now, and he is happy."

Odin nodded. "Pray to God that he will remain so."

"Indeed." He turned to him again and his smile faded. "If I tell you this, Signor, if I tell you all that happened and all I know, is there any chance, any possibility, that you could help me?"

"I will do all that I can."

Moreschi gave a grateful nod and, reaching inside his coat, he withdrew a small photograph, cupping it gently in the palm of his hand. A lovely young woman stared from the picture, smiling brightly as she reached to gather up the large bouquet of wild flowers that lay at her feet. Her hair was dark and long, falling past her shoulders to cover her bare arms, and in her smile was written all the innocence in the world, vulnerable and yet possessed of the greatest strength, untouchable in its indefinite fragility.

"She was beautiful, wasn't she?"

Odin nodded. "Yes."

"Her name was Giambattista. She was…she was a nurse…we met when I was hospitalized after the city was laid siege by OZ. I was so much older than she was, but that never mattered to her…she was so beautiful…" His voice choked with embittered tears and he pressed his fingertips to his forehead to prevent himself from weeping.

Odin pressed a hand to his shoulder. "What happened to her?"

"It was a mistake…a damned mistake. Neither of us had ever had anything to do with OZ or the Alliance, or with any military for that matter. After what happened in 196, when they arrested the soldiers who served under Dekim Barton and freed his prisoners…they took the injured the hospital where Giambattista worked."

"Go on."

"There was one of them…no one ever knew whether she was truly a soldier or a prisoner…she was from France but not really, if that makes sense…"

"What do you mean?"

"She spoke with a very thick French accent, so it was assumed that she lived there before…before she joined with Dekim or was captured…but she didn't look French at all."

"Go on."

"This woman was found with a disk that she would not let leave her sight, even in the hospital. She would never say what it contained but all of Barton's files were found at his base on the colony and they allowed her to keep itYI think it was because of her condition, really."

"Excuse me—her condition?"

Moreschi nodded. "She was an amnesiac. The only things she knew were her name and that she had to keep the disk."

"What was her name?"

"She said it was Lisette Coulmier, but no records of her exist."

"Are you certain she was not lying?"

"Quite. She wept when she was told that she had no records."

"And this was all she remembered?"

"Yes."

"What was the cause of her amnesia? Did she suffer any head trauma?"

Moreschi shook his head. "She was in perfect physical health." He paused, gathered his composure, and went on. "Giambattista cared for her, became friends with her. When she was released from the hospital, they couldn't arrest her because they knew as little of her involvement with Dekim as she did, and Giambattista invited her to stay with us. Our son loved her…and she was so grateful. We all loved her, really. She was quite a strong person, despite her condition, but she was still so…so fragile…we all felt so sorry for her…she was like family after a few months."

"But she still had the disk."

Moreschi nodded. "Yes. They came for her after she'd been with us for a little over a year. She still had no memory of anything that had happened before she was found, and to my knowledge she never actually opened the files on the disk." His lips trembled and again he was forced to pause. "They came early in the morning. They were dressed as officers of the Sanq Kingdom, and they said they were there to take her into custody, that they had located her remaining family and they were living in Sanq. I almost believed them."

"Why didn't you?"

"One of them asked about the disk. That information was withheld from the records of how she was found." He swallowed, clutched his wife's picture tighter. "Two more of them started to search the house while Giambattista and I tried to explain Lisette's condition. They found her room empty, but the sheets on her bed were still warm, like she had been there only a few minutes before. Her window was open. The jump would have been very high, but it seemed that she made it uninjured."

"What did they do?"

"Nothing. They left. They gave use a number and said we were to call them if she returned." Again he paused, staring down at the photograph. "She came back that night. She would be leaving again, she said, and she was sorry for having involved us. We weren't to tell them anything about her or that she had come back. She promised to contact us again as soon as it was safe. She…she couldn't stop crying."

Odin tightened his grip on his shoulder. "What happened?"

"They swarmed the house. They had been watching us all day, waiting for her. One of them shouted at her to give herself up and she panicked. I've never seen someone so terrified in all my life. She ran and…and Giambattista went after her. She was only trying to help her…" A quiet sob escaped his throat. "They caught her in the street only two blocks from where we lived…shot her in the back before they had even seen her face." His quaking hand closed about the photograph. "Lisette had dark hair like Giambattista's…they just mistook the two, the damned fools.' He broke off and could not go on for several minutes. A silent tear fell from the corner of his eye and the boys seemed to sing a hymn of mourning. "They issued me a formal apology. They said that Lisette had been identified as a criminal wanted in Sanq, to explain their use of force. I didn't believe them. I suppose it showed. They monitored my house for a few weeks, in case she came back, but when she didn't they left. They didn't really, though. They're still watching me, either because they think we were involved in whatever Lisette did for Barton or because I am simply connected to her. I've seen them, and my son has as well. Last week two men stopped him on his way home from the choir and asked him to show them to a certain street; he said they looked like two of the officers who had tried to arrest Lisette. I walk with him now."

Odin gave him an endearing look. "I assure you, Signor Moreschi, no harm will come to your son. You shall have the protection of all my allies in the city."

His eyes filled with tears. "I thank you, Signor, most sincerely. There is one other matter, though."

Odin raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"Lisette has been contacting me in secret. I wanted to hate her after what happened to Giambattista, but I…I cannot. I do not believe she is a criminal. And she has grieved for my wife almost as deeply as I have. She was Giambattista's friend, her sister, and for my wife I will not turn my back on her. She needs help, Signor. She cannot leave the city, and she fears they are about to find her. She is desperate."

"Are you asking me to assist in this as well?"

"No, Signor. I am begging you to. I have asked too much of you already, and I do not even know you. I would never have contacted you in the first place, but I was told that you are quite adept at procuring such things—"he patted the case that held the gun—"and that you have been involved in matters regarding Dekim Barton before."

Odin nodded. "I have. The man killed me once."

Moreschi blinked but went on. "I have no right to ask this of you, but is there any way you could intervene for her as you have for me?"

Odin sat back, fold his hands. "Of course. I will do what I can."

"I have no right to ask this of you."

"Tell me, Signor, did you tell the doctors who treated your injuries after OZ's attack you had no right to ask them to?"

"Of course not."

"Then you will not say it to me. This is my occupation just as treating you was theirs."

A grateful smile lit upon Moreschi's sorrowful face. "Thank you, Signor. I will never be able to repay you for this."

"I believe my payment is already here." He glanced down at the case held between Moreschi's knees.

"It is not enough."

"It is more than enough. I have wanted this far longer than you have wanted that gun."

"You are too kind, Signor."

"It is too soon to judge me so." He paused, considering. "What of Lisette?"

"I am to contact her tonight. She must be gotten out of Rome as soon as possible."

"Then I will meet with her tomorrow. Will that be possible for her?"

"Yes, very."

"Then tell her to come to the café across the street precisely at 11:00. I will be on the second floor, outside on the terrace."

"How shall I tell her to know you?"

"I will be dressed as I am now, and I will be reading a Japanese newspaper. Is that enough?"

Moreschi gave a slight nod. "It should be."

"Then tell her. The hour is early, I know, but if she will come at eleven, with luck she will be out of the country by…I would say by four."

"That is quite exact, Signor."

"I do try to be. It is the best approximation I can give at this time." He paused, looked up at the choir. "They are almost done, I believe."

Moreschi, as though taking a cue, lifted the case between his knees and pushed it toward Odin. "I still do not believe that this is enough, but it is very kind of you to accept it."

"Again, Signor Moreschi, you judge too quickly."

Moreschi laughed. "That may be true, but if I must make quick judgments to save my son, I will do so." Again he offered the case, and this time Odin took it. "I hope you do not mind, Signor…I have taken the liberty of having it tuned for you, but I understand that you will probably want to tune it to your own tastes."

Odin merely smiled. "Thank you, Signor." He took the case by the handle and stood to leave. "I know that you are anxious, Signor Moreschi, but I assure you: no harm shall come to you or your son. You do not know the power of those who will be protecting you now, and should something occur outside of their sight, you now have the means to protect yourself. All the world may seem your enemy now, but I promise you that it will pass."

A grateful tear fell from his eye. "Thank you, Signor. You…thank you."

"You are welcome." With that he took his leave, granting only one more glance to the placid choir before exiting the church.

The air outside was cool, a pleasant change from the dreadful heat of the day that had earlier almost been able to keep tourists indoors. The sun's descent into the horizon was almost completed, and the sky had at last been transfigured from a blinding sheet of opaque blue to a sea of violet, speckled only by the fewest stars and the small distant lights of the colonies. Again the streets had filled with people, if in truth they were ever really devoid of them, talking and laughing and chattering to create one exotic song, a harmony of a million voices mingling into one. The more casual clothes of the afternoon had been replaced by those of a sublime and uniform elegance, white linens and black silks, and all the city was a completely different world now, the vision of a dream.

He descended the stairs quickly and calmly, holding the case at his side as he had the one he had carried into the church. His dark eyes scanned his surroundings for but a minute before he proceeded, certain that he was not watched, and beyond the attention of any he began to walk in the direction opposite the one from which he had come earlier. No one noticed him, even despite the long coat he wore. No one cared to. Anonymity was his preference, as it had always been, and if he so chose it even the most curious eye would pay him no mind. He moved at the pace of the others, attracting attention from no on and giving it to no one, almost as if he didn't exist.

He turned the corner of the next street, and, entering the courtyard of another church, ducked into the cloister. No one noticed his sudden disappearance. He proceeded to the end of the cloister, passing more of those who only glanced in his direction before returning their thoughts to their own lives. A young couple looked up at him; an elderly man held tighter his rosary. Three children disobeyed their mother's admonition not to stare before she came to collect them. Two priests, one quite young and the other closer to Odin's age, nodded in greeting. At last he passed a woman who, admiring a statue of a nameless saint, did nothing.

He intended on keeping his promise to Moreschi. The moment Moreschi and his young son left the church they would be followed, in utmost and perfect discretion, back to their home, where they would be guarded throughout the night. A bird could not light upon a tree on the premises without being seen. Anywhere Moreschi went he would be watched, and should any incident occur, he would learn that the strength of his allies truly was greater than that of his enemies.

Three days had passed since he had been contacted by Moreschi, and already he had organized this with only two phone calls and a letter sent via computer.

He was close to deciding that this would be a success.

He was still considering the particulars of the situation, though. Ultimately those who threatened Moreschi would have to be eliminated, once their purpose was discovered. Certainly he could find someone to take care of that.

He was not the assassin any longer. Now he was merely the one who dispatched them.

He set the case down at his feet, withdrew from an inner pocket of his coat a small cellular phone. It required only two digits to dial the needed number.

The phone rang only once before a woman answered, laughing almost hysterically. "_Pronto_?"

"Good evening, Celina."

A note of genuine enthusiasm arose in her voice. "Signor Lowe. I would say that this is a pleasant surprise, had my husband not already told me to expect a call from you today."

"How is Lorenzo?"

"He is very well. Signor Rhyn is currently entertaining him with a very vivid account of how he was injured in the war." As if to prove this another burst of laughter erupted in the background.

"Ah, and how are he and Marguerite?"

"Beautiful, as always. They are considering joining the opera here."

"Is that so? And how are you, my love?"

Celina laughed softly. "As well as any. This heat tires me."

"Then perhaps you should come out this evening; it has gotten quite cooler."

"I will consider that. I suppose you would like to speak to my husband."

"Yes, please, if Rhyn will spare him."

There was a low click as she laid aside the phone, then another when Lorenzo picked up another one in a more private room elsewhere in the house. "Signor Lowe? Did you meet with him?"

"I did. All is taken care of. Do you have any information that might prove useful to me?"

"None as yet; I am sorry, Signor Lowe. Some neighbors of Moreschi reported having seen men in odd uniforms outside their houses at night throughout the week after his wife's death—I trust he told you the particulars; if not, I found the official police report--"

"He did."

"Beyond that there is nothing thus far. Signor Rhyn would like your permission to look into the matter."

"Granted."

"I am sorry, Signor."

"Do not be--I had expected as much. I wonder, though, if you could perhaps do something else for me, and pass the word along where it is needed?"

"Of course."

"Tomorrow morning I am to meet the woman who was involved with the Moreschi's. I have given my word to Moreschi that I will help her, but I am still not certain that she is to be trusted."

"What would you like me to do?"

"Hire one of your pilots, in the smallest and most private carrier possible, to take her out of the country, to Athens. I will have determined whether or not she is armed by the time I bring her to you, but put someone on board who is prepared to handle her if she should create a situation. Also, if you have someone who is fluent in French, put them on at my expense."

"Consider it done, Signor. But what shall we do once at Athens?"

"I will contact you. I must make those arrangements."

"Very well, then."

"That is all."

"Then you must excuse me, Signor--I will need to arrange this tonight."

"I understand. One more thing, Lorenzo—"

"Yes?"

"Take Celina out tonight. Let her breathe cooler air--it would be very good for her."

Lorenzo gave a soft laugh. "Yes, Signor," he said, and hung up.

Odin ended the call and placed the phone back into his coat. All was taken care of now. Moreschi was now perhaps safer than he had been in years, and the boy with him. The woman he would deal with tomorrow. There was a far more pressing matter on his mind now.

He knelt down, opened the case. _His priceless payment._ The violin lay perfectly inside, dark and beautiful as a holy relic beneath the purple glow of the evening sky and the lights of the city, a glorious monument to all that man could never understand nor even touch. A Stradivarius. Perhaps the most beautiful thing ever crafted by the hand of man.

He removed the instrument, held it to his chin. The bow fit into his hand perfectly, and he needed not readjust his fingers to hold it properly.

Gently, almost tentatively, he pulled the bow over the strings, closing his eyes lest some movement within the cloister or in the courtyard attract his attention away from the violin. He almost trembled at the sound, the feel of it in his hand. It was tuned to near perfection; he would suit it to his ear later. For now he merely wanted to play it.

The fugue. That would be good enough for now, the fugue he had heard in his own mind all those years ago, when those who had trained him to become what he now was left him the old violin; the fugue that had guided his fingers to learn the instrument. There was no other song he would rather play upon this one first, really.

He forgot all about Antonio Moreschi and the woman he was to meet tomorrow and began to play.

22


	5. Chapter 5: The Fallen

awaken

_awaken_

The Fallen

He shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders. The jovial sounds of Rome all but deafened him, the merry laughing, the petty speech that as though by necessity filled the mouth of every person. Let them go on with their incessant noise; had they not earned it, through all the pain of the past years, the terror that only a true war could elicit? But then how many of these people had actually known that hellish anguish? How many of them had actually witnessed the true destruction of those wars? How many had truly seen it, truly _felt_ it, and how many had only witnessed it upon television screens, safe in their own homes and cities that were of no use to the Alliance? And how many had been among those who had inflicted that pain?

Enough of this. It was not his place to judge. He knew nothing about them, and they knew nothing of him. Let them go on with it. It was their right, simply for being human.

He had arrived only that morning. Most of the day he had spent in the hotel, sleeping on the carpeted floor as one unconscious. He could not explain why he had been so tired; he did not try to. It did not matter to him, ultimately.

He had received no other sign since his arrival, no other message, nor had he seen Odin. Of course not. This was Rome, after all, and there was no real reason to believe that the message he had found in the Spanish base had been left for him or even concerned Odin. He had expected no different.

But nonetheless he wondered, and his eyes scanned every face he passed.

He did not know why he had come here, or why he sought the assassin. In truth he had no desire to ever see him again. Odin Lowe was nonexistent to his mind now, and it was best that he remain so.

Perhaps it was that ever-elusive cause that he sought, the purpose for his continued existence. There would be no new war. He had accepted that. He only needed somethingYsomething.

Odin could not give that to him now. No one could. He was lost now, truly lost as he had never been before. He had no reason to live and no one who was aware enough of his existence to care if he did not. All those he had known in the past were gone now, dead or moved on to find their own lives. They had forgotten him. He was the only one who could not move on, and moving back had never been possible. Without a purpose there was only one option left to him.

Perhaps he was seeking Odin to dissuade him from this. He was the only one who had ever genuinely cared enough to prevent him from doing such a thing. Perhaps he was even the only one who would still remember him.

_I hope I don't find you,_ he thought, searching the crowd. _I hope I don't find you, I hope that you are dead and forgotten with her, I hope that you see my face and don't recognize me, I hope I don't find you…_

And yet he continued to search.

He would be returning to the hotel soon. It seemed ridiculous somehow, that he should have taken the time to check into and return to a hotel when all his life he had been accustomed to sleeping wherever he was. He thought that maybe he only did this so if it were Odin who was looking for him he could be more easily found. That was even more ridiculous than the notion of staying there, though. If Odin really was in Rome and seeking him, he had known Heero was there within an hour of his arrival.

He was so tired of this. He was tired of this constant sense of uselessness and the knowledge that he was now a part of the world around him, that there was no longer any cause that would separate him from it. All of life loomed before him and he could do nothing about it, save to cower worthlessly as he did now.

That was the purpose of a soldier. A soldier lived for his cause, apart from the rest of the world, and when that cause was realized he could do nothing. A true soldier did not have the capacity to find a new life, to engage in human trivialities; he worked only for the mission given to him.

Dekim Barton had tried to create in him a true soldier and he had succeeded.

He turned the corner, swept into the next street by the throng of people around him. A young couple lifted their clasped hands above his head as they ran past him, laughing happily. A small child, pursued by her young brother and their parents, darted by his legs. All the world seemed at this moment caught up in the brightest jubilation, and he was merely a blemish to them, a dark spot marring their perfect merriment.

There was nothing he wanted more at this moment than to merely fade away into nothing, to press the button of the self-destruct switch one more time and pray to whatever force existed beyond life, to God, to the system itself, to let him die, to take him now and return his soul to oblivion.

He could not abide this crowd much longer. Their voices were too loud, their laughing smiles too wide, their painted eyes too sternYthis was unbearable. He thought of that evening in Spain, when he had become so anxious while caught in the crowd, how his nose had begun to bleed. He could not do this again. He could not. He could not stand this, not now, not again, not ever, he could not endure this any longer…

He lifted his hands, ran them through his dampened hair. He must stop this. These were the actions of a coward, a pathetic fool who allowed himself to feel genuine fear, not a soldier.

But then that was all a soldier was, when he no longer had a mission to accomplish. A pathetic fool.

A wearied sigh passed his lips. Sleep--that was all he needed, one more night of dark and dreamless sleep before he made up his mind whether he was going to leave or remain in the city. He would give up this foolish quest for the evening and for but a few hours he would sacrifice all thought, and then in the morning all would right itself. He needed do nothing more than that.

The trembling subsided, the wicked physical anxiety that had overtaken him. His vision cleared. The perspiration that matted his hair to his forehead turned cold and ceased to pour, merely dripping down onto his neck in chilled little rivulets, soaking into his loose shirt. Others stared at him, perhaps believing him ill or maybe only deranged, but their faces were human now, their features benevolent flesh, and caught tightly amongst them he at last found that he could breathe.

This would all be over soon. It could not last very much longer. Either he would at last be given, by man or by fate, a new purpose, or he would employ his gun one final time and thus be done with it.

_You know nothing of this, do you, Odin? You with all your memories, with the knowledge of every sin you have ever committed, you know guilt but you do not truly know this, nor can you. You fulfill one purpose only to create a new one for yourself, and you are too empathic to feel this. Your own memories will not allow you to be alone. _

But that was not true, was it? No, it could not be. Odin was empathic but still detached, in a way that Heero could never be. It was this detachment that allowed him to eternally move on from one purpose to another, and when he had none to simply live as any other member of the human race. He could begin a war and the very moment it ended, after the last shred of evidence was cleared away, pack away his gun and attend an opera, without any thought to what he had just done. He had never allowed himself to be a soldier, nor even an assassin. He was merely a man, whose soul belonged to the world and to nothing else.

He had never belonged to anything, not even to his mission. He had never wanted to. Perhaps that was Dekim Barton's final legacy to him.

He forsook the crowd, stepping into the alley between two buildings. For the longest time he merely stood against the wall, listening to the sound of his own deep respiration, and then after several minutes he became aware that someone was watching him.

He turned around, reaching almost unconsciously for his gun. It trembled in his grasp. At first he did not see her, so dark were the evening shadows within the alley, until silently from them she emerged, a deathly figure of forgotten justice, a fallen angel of mercy. The chill light fell upon her pale face and even as she raised the weapon he found himself paralyzed. He could not move. He could not breathe. He could do nothing but stare in wonder into her familiar countenance.

_I think that I will drink your blood once I've killed you._

He was not seeing this. He could not be. There was no way under God or in hell that he was. This was merely a product of his overly taxed mind, an hallucination brought on by these accursed memories. She was dead. He had seen her die, he had seen the last drop of blood run out from her pitiful corpse. _He had seen her._

She advanced upon him, holding the gun level with his head. "Heero Yuy," she breathed, her face contorting from an expression of placidity to one of wondrous rage. Her living eyes danced. "Takeru."

He heard her voice; he physically _heard _it, reverberating for all its whispering beauty from the walls that enclosed them. This was real and she was standing alive before him, and in her hand she held a weapon poised to kill him.

_You would have to give it to me then._

At last he understood the purpose of the message left in Spain.

His hands fell slack at his sides. He tried to speak and could not. His head swam and his vision blurred; he felt a warm trickle stream over his lips. This was not happening; it could not be, this was impossible...

He turned to run. The bullet cut into his back, sending him to the ground. No sound had issued from the gun; she has used a silencer. Even as he heard the sound of her fleeing footsteps someone on the street glimpsed his body, and calling for assistance they knelt over him. All the world began to go black. A hand grazed the wound and he cried out weakly, unable to do anything else. He was dying.

_You would have to give it to me then._

_Yes, my love, I give it you now._

Someone lifted his head, called something to him in Italian. He could not understand enough to answer it. "Odin Lowe," he whispered, struggling against the darkness that threatened to consume him. "Find him." He could not fight any longer. His life was ebbing out of him in gasping waves; there was nothing more he could do.

_What will you do, Takeru, when nothing disturbs you any longer?_

Strangely as he died, as he felt his body being lifted from the cold ground and the blood that had lain beneath it, the image that played out in his mind was that of the final battle with the Epyon, and his last fleeting thought was that he could not let Zechs lose this time, that this time the switch was in his hand and his thumb was poised over the button. The blood rushed from his shuddering body; he pushed down upon the button, and knew no more.

25


	6. Chapter 6: Awaken

Awaken Awaken

At 10:30 the following morning, as promised, a man dressed in a black trench coat arrived at the café across the street from the church where Antonio Moreschi had come in search in a very different kind of salvation. He requested a table on the second floor, out on the terrace, and under the glare of the early morning sun he unfolded a newspaper, tracing the vertical lines of an obviously Asiatic text with one finger as he read it. At 10:34 he ordered a glass of white wine and another of water; three minutes later the young waitress returned with this order. She flirted with her patron for two minutes and then after receiving her payment--as well as a generous tip--she left him, and the man continued to read in peace.

At precisely 11:02 a woman wearing a white veil entered the café. She informed the hostess that she was supposed to meet someone on the terrace and was allowed to go up, where after but a few moments of searching the faces of the few other patrons, she stepped outside.

He glanced up at the soft sound of the door opening, paused when he noted the woman's strange appearance. She did not seem to see him. She went directly to the edge of the terrace and turning her back to him she leaned upon the railing. Peering down into the street, she pulled back the veil and tied it about her neck like a scarf. She appeared to tremble as she moved, and the manner in which she lowered her shoulders and crossed her arms across her abdomen spoke openly of her fear.

She knew he was there. She had not looked for him but she knew it, else she would not have dared reveal herself in so public a place.

This was not a sign of her trust, however. He would not have been foolish enough to make such an assumption. It was merely a sign of her desperation.

He sat back in the chair, studied her carefully. She was slender and rather short, only barely a few inches over five feet tall. Her dark hair fell halfway to her waist, pinned at the nape of her neck with a simple barrette. She wore a simple blouse of white silk and loose black pants, and strangely something about her seemed vaguely familiar to him. He narrowed his eyes, surveying her more closely, but no answer came to him. And yet this feeling would not desist, as though it carried some significance that must, for the time being, elude him.

She shifted from one foot to the other, moving almost nervously. A light breeze rippled the loose cloth of her pants and for one moment he could see beneath them, strapped to her thigh, the vague outline of a gun. She was not entirely unprotected, then.

She carried nothing else with her, no case, no bag, not even the smallest purse. He wondered briefly if Moreschi had indeed told her that she would be leaving the country today. Surely he had. Such a detail as that could not be so easily forgotten. Perhaps she simply intended to take nothing with her, save for the gun.

He returned to reading the newspaper, scanning headlines and merely skimming articles. Let her come when she was ready to. They were not quite pressed for time yet.

A young couple entered the terrace, sat down at a table to Odin's left. After ordering, their spirited conversation turned to an incident that had occurred the previous evening, involving a young foreigner. He listened intently, requiring no consideration to discern their rapid Italian, until he derived the full story. A young man, approximately twenty years of age, had been shot in the street in the very midst of the city shortly before nightfall, in full view of the crowd. No one had heard the shot, no had anyone seen the perpetrator. The man simply collapsed, bleeding from a bullet wound in his back, just below his neck. No one knew yet if he had lived or died.

This was all they seemed to know. Their conversation continued upon this path for several more minutes, then abruptly turned to brighter things when the waitress who had served Odin returned with their order. Uninterested in the musings of their daily lives, he ceased to listen.

The woman had moved from her place at the wall. Sometime as he had been following the couple's account of the night before she had gone around the terrace to stand behind him, still gazing outward at the city around them. She was gathering her courage, then. He continued to read, hoping that his distraction might encourage her. For a while she did not move; at last, after several minutes, she took a seat at the table behind him, sitting so that her back was turned to him and her chair was against his.

"Odin Lowe, I presume?" she said quietly, in thickly accented and perfect French. Her soft voice trembled.

He did not turn to face her, not wanting to frighten her more. "Mademoiselle Coulmier." He took another sip of the wine and waited for her to speak again.

"I would like to thank you, Monsieur. You have no idea how much you are doing for me."

"It is no trouble, I assure you. You do know that you are leaving today?"

"Yes."

"I have arranged a private flight for you at four this afternoon."

"And until then?"

"Until then you will be kept safe at the home of one of my associates.

"Where am I going?"

"To Athens, unless you have an aversion to that city."

"Not at all."

"Then it is settled."

She remained silent. Faintly he could hear the sound of her nails tapping anxiously against the table.

"My life is in your hands, Monsieur," she said finally, sighing almost in resignation. "I have no other choice but to trust you."

"I assure you, Mademoiselle, you have not placed your trust foolishly. I will do everything in my power to guarantee your safety."

Again she sighed, considering this. "Shall we leave then?"

"If that is what you wish."

"It is."

"Then we shall."

She rose from the chair and it seemed that even in the moment before she turned to face him he _knew_, though no sign of her identity had been given. His breath caught in his throat and for this moment he could hear nothing but the sound of his own heart beating, quickly as that of one terrified. Her face came into view and he audibly gasped. The newspaper fell from his hands. Her own eyes widened when she saw him and her full lips parted in astonishment; as their eyes met all time seemed to halt.

A hoarse gasp erupted from her throat. "Assassin," she breathed, and her hands flew to her pale face, covering her quivering mouth. She gasped again as though struggling to breathe.

His lips struggled to form her name. "S-Sakura."

She merely stared at him for an eternity, in which it seemed that the current world ended and a new one began. "Assassin," she repeated quietly, though without her former convictions, and above her dark eyes her brow furrowed, as though she did not understand why she had spoken this word.

He rose shakily from the chair, reached to take her hand. It felt almost as though his eyes had filled with tears. He did not believe that he would be able to touch her; he believed that when his fingers grazed across the back of her hand he would feel only the air, and the image of her would fade, leaving him alone and talking to himself, waiting still for the woman who was to meet him there. This could not be real. This could not be happening. She was dead. She had died almost fifteen years ago. He had seen her die, had watched her take her final breath. _He had held her as she died._

He took her small hand in his, embraced her slowly. She did not fade away; she was as solid in his arms now as she had been so many years ago, when in secrecy and solitude he had at last been allowed to hold her. Her flesh was warm and living and unlike that of an imagined phantom it yielded to him, speaking of its own reality. She shuddered in his arms, uttering a low gasp and stepping back as though to pull away from him. He held her fast, lowered his face so that his lips could caress her dark hair as he spoke.

He did not ask for an explanation. He did not need one. Whatever had happened, whatever had allowed this strange miracle to occur, he did not want to know. Later, when the rush of seeing her, of feeling her for the first time in all these years, had dwindled he would ask, but he could not now. This was real. _She_ was real, and she was really here, and for now this was all that mattered. "Sakura.."

She pushed him back, trembling in rage, in fear, confusion. "Don't touch me," she hissed, holding her hands up in defense. "Don't come near me." People were watching them now in subdued curiosity but she did not seem to care. Her dark eyes were alive in perplexed terror, and it was only now that he acknowledged realization.

Moreschi's words, spoken only last night: _she was an amnesiac…_

She did not know him. She had called him 'assassin' simply out of unconscious memory, but she did not know why. Here she stood before him, aged only slightly from the last time he had seen her, his beautiful Sakura, perfect Sakura, and yet she had no memory of being Sakura. In her mind she _was _Lisette Coulmier, and no other life existed to her.

He took another step back, shaken. This could not be happening. This was too cruel, even crueler than all these years in which he had believed her dead, all these years that she had spent at Dekim Barton's mercy. He did not think he could take this.

He could not take any of it, really. Not the sight of her, living and beautiful, in front of him as though he had never seen her die, her small body riddled with bullets. Not the terrible thought of all that had happened to her since she had been taken from him. Not the horrifying knowledge that she was not truly Sakura Hanasaki anymore. It was all too much. Never in his life had he exhibited a true reaction and even now he did not really, but he felt within himself a strange sense of tightening, as though his brain was collapsing upon itself and his lungs with it, closing in until he could not think, could not breathe. His heart pounded between his ears, filling his head with its insistent throbbing. For one moment he could not hear her, could not see her. He could not accept this.

"Don't touch me," she repeated, sounding as if she would soon weep. Her lovely French accent seemed an abomination to her voice.

He nodded, fought to regain his composure. "Yes, Mademoiselle, but please calm down. I am not going to hurt you."

"I don't know you," she stammered, shuddering again. "I do not know who you are."

Strangely these words seemed more as though they were spoken in affirmation than defense.

"I do not know you, either, Mademoiselle." How it pained him to say this, to see her, to know this.

"Then whyYwhy would I call you that?" A small tear fell from her eye, marring the beauty of her perfect face. She truly did not know him, did not remember him at all.

"Please, Mademoiselle Coulmier, please, I will explain this."

A frightened sigh escaped her lips and she began to weep. One hand moved to her hip and before he could even think to realize what she was doing she withdrew the gun and aimed it at his forehead.

He did not move. Later it would occur to him that, so accustomed was he to this sight, he did not even flinch. The small crowd on the terrace emitted a unanimous gasp and several began to make their way toward the door. A waitress dropped a glass, not even glancing down as it shattered at her feet. The cellular phone in his coat vibrated against his chest; those who had been monitoring the events upon the terrace were surely wondering if, by the woman's latest actions, their assistance would be required.

"I will not be needing your help, assassin," she said at last. Her voice was calm now, almost cold. Slowly she began to back away from him, keeping the gun trained on his head. There was nothing he could do to stop her. If she had maintained her strength from years past there was no doubt she could overtake him in her fear, and if not he would surely have to hurt her to stop her. He could not do that. He would not.

She made her way to the door and after one final moment of staring at him in fearful outrage, she turned and ran back inside.

Without a moment's consideration he followed after her. The phone began to vibrate again and he ignored it. Let them be confused; he did not care. The only thing that concerned him now was Sakura.

She had already made it to the street by the time he pushed through all those who fought to get upstairs. The veil flew out behind her as she turned a corner, running madly against the crowd, and as he gave pursuit he had the maddening thought that if he were ever able to get close enough to her he might be forced to grab hold of the veil to stop her, using it almost as a rein against her throat. He would rather tackle her there on the sidewalk than do that.

She looked back over her shoulder, cried out when she saw him running after. She struggled to run faster and, stumbling, dropped the gun, pausing to pick it up and then forsaking it. For a moment she disappeared behind a large truck that blocked a small side street and rounding the corner he saw her take hold of a ladder on the back of an apartment building. Others were following them now; faintly he could hear the dissonant wail of a police siren. Too much could go wrong with this, but he did not care.

He went to the ladder, began to ascend after her. He would not lose her again.

29


	7. Chapter 7: The Watchers

The Watchers

The Watchers

He kissed her pale cheek, curling his hand in her red hair. She blushed and uttered the smallest laugh while slapping his hand playfully away.

"We shouldn't do this," she whispered, learning to press her lips to the sensitive flesh of his ear.

He shuddered pleasantly, smiled. "And why is that?"

She glanced at the small black box, the headphones that lay beside it. "You're supposed to be listening."

"If they need me that badly, someone will tell Lorenzo to tell Celina to tell me over the open frequency that they need me…that badly." He paused, considering the ending of this remark, and when he decided that it did indeed match its beginning he gave another wide smile and leaned to kiss her again.

The black box emitted a high squeal, followed by Celina's frantic voice. "Signor Rhyn?"

He groaned, pulled away from her. "What is it, love?"

"What are you doing? Lorenzo has been trying to get your attention for five minutes now."

"Sorry, Celina, _bella_, I took the headphones off because the little mouthpiece-microphone-type thing was in my way."

She cursed him in Italian. "Something is happening."

He waited for an answer and when even at his prodding she did not reply, he sat up and pulled the headphones back on.

Marguerite, made somber in but an instant, picked up his gun and held it across her lap, waiting for their orders.

He coughed into the mouthpiece, wincing as the sound echoed in his own ears. "You there, loves?" he asked, and then utilizing his most horrendous Roman accent, he repeated it in Italian.

Lorenzo was the one to answer. "Where are you?"

"Where do you think? I'm here, I'm on the bloody rooftop, right where I've been all bloody day!"

"Are you in position?"

"Well, no, love, that's a bit hard to do without you here, now, isn't it?"

"Stop being a complete imbecile and listen to me."

He laughed, winked at Marguerite. "Tell me, love," he said to Lorenzo, pressing his lips to the mouthpiece to muffle his voice. The line hummed with static as he spoke. "Do I sound British on this thing?"

"Yes, you fool, you sound British now and when you die the settling of your bones will sound British, now will you listen to me!"

"I'm all ears, dear."

"She has a gun."

"Of course she does. If you were being hunted by great unknown government forces, wouldn't you have a gun?"

"She's just pulled it on Signor Lowe."

"Are you sure she's not giving it to him, presenting it to him as a birthday present, like? It _was _his birthday the other day, you know." He smirked proudly; he was, of course, the only one of them who truly did know Odin's birthday.

"Of course, you idiot!"

He blinked, startled. "Well, now, that could be a problem, couldn't it?"

"Are you in position?"

"Of course, like I've been the entire time. Hand me that, will you, Marguerite?" He reached for the gun, caressed her hand as he took it from her. "Thank you, darling." He waited, kneeling, holding the gun on the ground before him. At last Lorenzo announced "She's running," and he, along with a dozen others scattered throughout the vicinity, took hold of his gun, ready to raise it should the order be given.

The sounds of countless voices filled his ears, cursing, ordering, demanding, alternating between Italian and English. The woman had turned down this street and Odin was giving pursuit; the woman had thrown something down on the sidewalk, perhaps a gun. The police had now officially been notified. The woman turned down this alley, with Odin closing in behind her. A unit of officers had now been dispatched. She was climbing a ladder on the side of an apartment building; Odin was climbing after her; the police were being slowed by heavy traffic and meanwhile their own cars were on the move; the woman had just jumped from halfway up the ladder and kept running when she landed; she appeared to be uninjuredC

"Signor Rhyn?"

"I'm here, Lorenzo."

"Are you ready?"

"Of course."

"She is running toward you. Be prepared."

He lifted the gun and pressed it into his shoulder. "I am."

"She is coming directly toward you."

He leaned forward on the roof, looked down into the streets. Faintly he could see the figure of a woman, dressed in white and black, moving toward the alley he guarded. "I see her."

"Do you have a clear shot?"

The alley below him was empty. "Yes."

"Remember our objective."

"Of course, love." He waited a moment, moved forward again. He could almost see her face now. "She's here."

Lorenzo breathed deeply, did not respond. None of the others dared to speak.

She passed under him, stumbled. This loss of speed gave him just the opportunity he needed.

He aimed the gun at the center of her back, between her shoulder blades. Her long veil obstructed his view for but a moment; he cursed it and squeezed the trigger.

She screamed, staggered forward another step. A small red stain appeared on the back of her white shirt and frantically she tried to grasp the wound, all but flailing as she fell to the ground. Her slender body shuddered helplessly, once, twice, and then at last she lay still.

Odin appeared behind her, pale and almost disheveled. He shouted something angrily at the rooftop and ran to her body, kneeling beside her and gathering her up into his arms. The black limousine turned into the alley and almost tenderly he carried her to it, yelling orders at the driver.

Rhyn backed away from the edge of the roof, dropped the gun. Trembling, he rose to his feet and Marguerite stood with him, embracing him slowly.

"What is it, lovely?" she asked, touching his pale cheek.

He pulled off the headset and pressed his lips to her forehead. "I've a bad feeling I shouldn't have done that."

30


	8. Chapter 8: Lullaby

sweet, my love, thine own eyessweet, my love, thine own eyes

Lullaby

She slept soundly, her breathing slow and even, rhythmic as the pattern of waves upon the shore at night. She had not moved in over an hour now, and it was beginning to seem to him as though she never would again, that she would remain in this deep, unnatural slumber forever, passing out of existence as quickly as she had come again into it. Her head lay perfectly upon the pillow, tilted ever so slightly to the right so that her cheek seemed to shimmer in the lamplight, and often he found himself almost giving in to the urge to touch her, to run his fingers over the soft line of her jaw, her smooth chin, the delicate lobe of her ear, the fullness of her lips. It would be a sin to touch her. This was not Sakura Hanasaki who lay before him; this was Lisette Coulmier, the creation of Dekim Barton. Whoever she was.

He sighed, shifted in the chair. He had grown much calmer now, returning to the stoic state that always marked his disposition. No longer did his heart pound, nor could he feel the flushed panic upon his face. The trembling of his hands had ceased. Indeed, he seemed almost as he had been before the events of this morning, as though nothing had ever disturbed him nor even could, and he was able to watch her now in that same serenity with which he had observed her so many years ago.

The others had finally left him alone. Lorenzo had taken Celina out again, he for once taking the time to pull back his long hair, she wearing the white dress he had bought her the previous evening, the beautiful satin gown she would only be able to wear for another month or so, for then her abdomen would be swollen with their child. All those who had given up the hours of their mornings to linger in corners and lie on rooftops had long since departed. Rhyn, too, had disappeared, once he had finally ceased to weep in his fear of what Odin would do to him when he learned the woman's identity, promising to be back before midnight. Only Marguerite had remained; faintly he could hear her singing from the bedroom she shared with Rhyn, a lovely melody of the spring to contrast the day's events. None of them would disturb him for a while yet.

A soft moan escaped her parted lips. Perhaps in her sleep she was beginning to feel the pain now; when she awoke she would undoubtedly require a painkiller, and if she did so soon, he would be the only one there to administer it. Maybe by then she would have calmed enough to allow him to.

He glanced up at the clock. It was nearing ten now, and she would surely be waking soon. The thought of seeing her lively again, of looking into those sweet, dark eyes into which he had not been able to look in so many tortuous years, the thought of hearing her voice, accented now by the French she had been taught under the imprisonment of Dekim, almost terrified him. He was not entirely certain he could do it again. To let someone else be there when she awoke, that would be by far the more preferable choice, wouldn't it? To perhaps ask Marguerite to come and sit with her, to perhaps sing to her in her lovely rich soprano until she awakened. To leave her to their care, to pretend that he had never seen her, to tell himself that today had merely been a dream…It would be so easy. And yet he could not bring himself to do it, he could not even move from the chair, nor could he find the voice enough to call for Marguerite. He had to do this, not for himself but for her, for the woman he had watched die so long ago. He owed it to her, if nothing else.

The call had come four hours ago, before any of the others had left. A blood sample taken from the woman was compared with records of that of Sakura Hanasaki. Their blood types were the same. Their fingerprints were a perfectly identical match. In her own disbelief Celina had even unbuttoned the woman's shirt to reveal a series of scars upon her abdomen, thick, white scars that could only have been inflicted by so many bullets ripping into her small body, wounds left upon her years ago. It was confirmed now. Where earlier there could be for all of them a small shred of doubt now there could be none. And strangely he no longer found the prospect of doubt comforting. He had accepted the fact of her existence; it disturbed him, yes, but it was _acceptable_. This woman lying before him, brought to his attention merely by chance, was indeed Sakura Hanasaki, and this seemed as factual to him now as her death had only hours ago.

He found it quite ironic that his own state of disbelief had passed without him ever having noticed.

His thoughts turned now to the violin. He had not even touched it since last night, when he had returned to his own home to tune it. This task had not taken him long, and he needed not the assistance of another instrument. He knew with absolute accuracy the exact sound of each note, and even the slightest discrepancy he could hear. And yet he had never been taught this skill, nor anything else regarding the instrument. He had never needed to be. His own mind supplied him with the strange knowledge of sound, of time, and his ear with the greatest critical awareness. It was in this way that he, as a child, had learned it, and this was all he had ever required.

He supposed, without the taint of egotism, that in another time and another place, he might have been considered a prodigy.

_The first violin he had ever held had felt quite unlike the Stradivarius. The wood had been rougher, less well-cared-for, and the hard support for one's chin had seemed impossibly cold, feeling as though it were carved of ice and set upon the instrument as a cryptic decoration. The slender neck had at first seemed hard to grasp. As he pressed his fingers down upon the strings he imagined he felt a slight pain, for they seemed too thin and too sharp, digging into his soft fingertips too deeply for comfort. _

_He lifted the bow and fumbled with it, uncertain of how it was to be held, until as he brought it to the strings his hand seemed of its own volition to curve, and his trembling fingers at last loosened. The bones of his small wrist popped almost painfully. He shuddered, brought the bow to the last string. It trembled over it, emitting a low, dissonant squeal. _

_The noise in the next room ceased. He dropped the bow, letting it clatter to the floor as he lay the instrument haphazardly aside, and hastily he fled the room, leaving the violin to collect dust upon the table. _

_He had no intentions of coming back, no intentions of ever touching it again. It was useless to him, it did not matter to him. His fascination with its mere existence ended as abruptly as it had begun. _

_He returned to it late that night, after the other boys had long fallen asleep in their small beds and even their wards had retired. The violin lay exactly as he had left it; no one had come in hopes of catching whichever boy had attempted to play it or to even return it to its case. _

_He almost did not believe he would be able to touch it again, and yet his small hands found their grip upon it easily, and before he had even intended it he raised the bow, poising it over that same string. He closed his eyes. He imagined it all then, every profound moment of terror, each moment of fear he had experienced when left to their custody after he had watched them murder his family, his parents, his young siblings. Each moment of confusion when they did not kill him next, the childish solace he had taken__C__perhaps selfishly__C__at being placed into the room with the other boys, at the way the older ones embraced him and treated him as though he were now their own child. Every night of misunderstanding when in the dark he could hear the older boys' sighs, their hushed moans, and he could make out just the faintest shape of their lithe bodies all moving upon one bed; each moment of innocent pleasure when only recently they had begun to include him in their endeavors. Every day of bitterness as their wards sought to train him into what he would inevitably become. He imagined it all, every fleeting second, every moment to which he even at this young age found himself detached, and with these thoughts he brought the bow down. _

_The note was pure and soft, fading out as quickly as it had begun. He marveled that the sound did not hurt his ears this time. _

_He put the instrument down, plucked at the strings with his fingers. He had once heard a man tune a violin; when he was done it had sounded quite different from this one. He would have to tune it himself if he truly wanted it to sound right. _

_He thought of how that violin had sounded, hummed those pitches under his breath. He began to turn the little silver pegs below the instrument's bridge, then plucked the string again, considered the slight difference. And using this process he made the violin he held match the sound of that in his head, until at last it seemed to be perfect. _

_His fingers learned their way over the strings quickly, finding each note, each pattern, each rhythm he desired. The instrument became his dearest and most frequent companion, and often in the night, after the others were finished with their passionate exploits, he left their shared bedroom to play, indulging his soul as they had indulged his body. He needed no instruction or even music; he played whatever he heard, and when there was nothing for him to hear he played melodies of his own imaginings. It was the only thing to which he was not indifferent. _

_His 'wards,' those who had for some vendetta forever unknown to him killed his parents and taken him, those who daily trained him in the occupation that was inherently their own, began almost to endear him for his skill, requesting that he play for them, and presenting him before those who would actually care about these things as their prodigy. He did not care. The violin was all that mattered to him, ultimately, and so long as it was his to play he would do as they wished. _

"_He will be a great musician, at least, if not an assassin," one of them had said, running his fingers through his black hair, which then had been long and unruly. How suiting that it should almost be true. _

He could play it now, the beloved Stradivarius. He could enthrall himself with its beauteous glory until she awoke. He could, but to do so he would have to rise from the chair, and his legs would not allow that. She would awaken soon, and when she did, he would be there, to endure whatever reaction she might have.

He had played for her once, years ago, years before it had even seemed possible that she could die, when their relationship, for all its unspoken romance, had yet been innocent. She had heard him playing several times but only that once had he truly played _for_ her, and even then it had seemed that he never would again.

She had been dressed differently that day, in a simple white dress that left her shoulders bare and fell only to her pale knees, and looking at her he had realized that this was the first time he had ever seen her bare legs before. Her hair had been swept almost carelessly up, pinned atop her head only to fall in loose black strands down upon her neck. Even her tiny feet were bare, and when she sat upon the chair she curled them almost shyly beneath her, much in the manner of a young girl.

He had never truly realized how young she was until that moment.

"Is that your song?" she had asked, once he had finished the fugue that had been with him since his youth, the same song that had often guided his hands when he could find nothing other than his own compositions to play.

He had lowered the violin, smiled at her, calmly. "I suppose."

She raised an eyebrow. "Do I have a song?"

"Everyone does, I think."

A lovely smile graced her full lips. "Then play mine, please? I am sure you can hear it."

He had needed consider this request only for a few minutes. Closing his eyes he raised the instrument, and as he conjured an image of her he began to play.

Her song was tumultuous and sweet, a delicate sonata of simultaneous strength and frailty. The violin seemed to weep for her.

He wanted to play it now, her song, which he had in the years since her terrible death often found himself playing. He wanted her to awaken hearing it, perhaps in the foolish hope that were she to hear it she would recall who she was. Such wishes were futile. He could not make her remember Sakura, nor could he think of her as though she were Sakura. He ultimately had no choice in the matter.

But that would not be easy, and he lacked the strength to force himself to do it.

She uttered another quiet moan, stirred beneath the white sheet. Her small hand tightened upon the edge of the mattress. A short gasp wracked her body and her left eye fluttered briefly before falling closed again.

He sat up in the chair, cleared his throat. His heart seemed to sink down into his stomach.

Slowly she opened her eyes, blinking almost frantically. Strangely she did not cry out when she saw him, watching her, alone with her in this unknown place, nor did she even move. Her dark eyes studied him carefully, struggling to identify him, and when at last it seemed that she had, to his surprise, she merely gave a pained smile.

"Where am I?" she asked, beginning in French and then, remembering herself, switching to Italian.

"At the home of one of my associates and his wife, in Rome," he said, forcing himself to conceal the astonishment he felt, that same astonishment that had so contributed in frightening her that morning. "And if you would prefer to speak in French you may."

A rather grateful smile touched upon her lips. "_Merci_." She paused, winced. Her brow furrowed in discomfort.

"Are you in much pain?" he asked. Strange how his voice sounded almost more natural when he spoke in French than in his own native language.

She could only nod.

He leaned over, picked up a slender pitcher of water from the nightstand. It seemed cold enough still. He poured a sufficient amount into a glass and held it out to her, and when at last she took it he took from the drawer underneath a small bottle, from which he poured into his palm two small caplets. "Take these, then."

She swallowed them eagerly, without examination, and in her thirst she drained the glass completely. She raised up carefully, tried to touch the wound on her back. "What happened? Why are we still here?"

Blunt honesty seemed his only option. "You became quite aggressive, if you will, and ran from me, and one of my associates had no choice but to disable you, and IYfelt it would be unwise to take you to Athens in your state." Indeed, blunt honesty, but with the inevitable touch of a lie.

Again she touched the wound, grimaced. "A tranquilizer?"

He merely nodded. His composure was no longer threatened, for now he treated her not even truly as a person but more as a patient, unattached to him in any more complex emotional way.

She seemed to consider this for several minutes in utter unmoving silence, and during this silence his pulse again slowed to its normal, calm pace. _Yes_, he thought to himself, glancing away from her from time to time, do it this way, _let your vision blur just enough, so that her features are not really hers anymore, and she looks only like the European woman you assumed she was, look away until her eyes are no longer shaped like perfect almonds and her lips are no longer of the rounded Asiatic pout, until she even _looks_ like Lisette Coulmier, and her voice seems completely natural__Y_

She did not seem disturbed by this; in fact she seemed rather to understand it. "Is that all that happened? I do not…I do not feel very well."

He gave her a gentle smile. "Do you not remember any of it?"

"I remember going to the café, and I remember meeting you…" she stopped, considering. After a few minutes her brow furrowed and a soft laugh escaped her lips. "I do not remember anything else, I am sorry."

"That is to be expected with the tranquilizer you were given."

"It is to be expected anyway."

He blinked, learned forward in the chair. "What do you mean, Mademoiselle?"

"Sometimes I do not remember things: things that happen yesterday, or the day before, or even today…it is not often, but it does happen sometimes. I am told afterward that it usually happens after I have become emotionally distressed…of course, I do not remember what made me so later." Her voice was calm and even, as though this occurrence were so commonplace that it had ceased to faze her. "I do things sometimes, but I do not remember them, either. It frightens me…I seem to wake up, but I am in a different place, and sometimes I am wearing different clothes, as though days have passedYand sometimes I am in pain—"

" 'In pain?'"

"Sore, as though I have done something strenuous. The day after what happened at Antonio's house, my legs and back were sore."

"He said that you jumped from a second story window. You do not remember this?"

She gave a slight shrug. "Yes. No. Sometimes I do, I think. He had to tell me that night what had happened. I remembered them coming to the house, I saw them from my bedroom window, and after that…I can remember running, but that is all." Again she paused, and for the first time in her narrative she appeared almost frightened. "When I woke up this morning, my gun had been fired." She shuddered and looked up at him helplessly.

He leaned forward, and in a moment of daring he touched her pale hand. Her skin was warm, so very warm, vital with all the life that still existed within her. He struggled against the urge to run his fingers over her hand, to turn it over and feel the warmth of her palm, to stroke her slender wrist. This was not Sakura, and he had no right to treat her as though she were.

"Mademoiselle, do you have any memory at all of your involvement with Dekim Barton?"

A shadow passed over her eyes. "None."

"And the cause of your amnesia--it is truly unknown? I understand you were even examined for any possible head injuries."

She nodded. He looked away from her again, biting into his lip angrily. _The bastard, what had he done to her, what had he made of her, the inhuman beast…_

"Is something wrong?" she asked. She raised up again, looked contemplatively into his eyes. "Are you all right?'

He blinked, shook these thoughts from his head, forcing a smile. "_Oui, ma chere._ But are you?"

"I am afraid that I will never be able to apologize enough for what I did, but otherwise I am fine." She hugged the sheet tighter about herself, a gesture of feelings of safety. She did trust him now, then.

He released her hand. "Do not concern yourself with it, Mademoiselle. You are not to blame for your actions."

"Am I not?"

"What do you mean?"

"Am I not blame, when even I do not know what I have done or whom I've harmed?" Her voice was surprisingly calm when she said this, possessed of a serenity too deeply imbedded within her to be corrupted.

_Sakura, my darling, it is you, though it is not your mind. It is your soul, your heart; it is your beautiful face, your eyes, though they do not recognize me. You still exist somewhere within this mind that was twisted by Dekim Barton, and you are still inherently yourself, though you do not know it. You are still my Sakura._

He met her eyes placidly. "No, you are not. You are not responsible for anything that you have been made to do."

"You speak almost passionately, Monsieur. And there is no proof that I was 'made' to…to be the way I am. You are aware of this. I do not know who I am, or what I did for Dekim Barton. For all you or I know, Monsieur, I am as much a monster as he."

He fought against a shudder. "I assure you, I have every confidence that you are not."

She studied him strangely, seemingly to consider his convictions. Her brow furrowed and her almond eyes became narrow, and for the briefest moment she raised her hand as though to touch him before letting it fall back down onto the bed.

_Yes, my love, look at me, see me, recognize me, recognize me as the assassin if you cannot do so as your friend, your lover, but know that you know me__Y_

"I am sorry," she said at last, smiling gently. "I do not know what I am thinking, Monsieur. Forgive me."

He returned her smile. "It is no trouble. Do as you wish."

"I am not sure I understand."

"Whatever you wish to do, by all means you may do it."

"You are being too kind to me, Monsieur."

_You do not know, you do not understand, you do not know that your face alone gives me every reason to worship you. _"I wonder," he said, "did you say that to Signore Moreschi?"

She nodded. "Yes. He and Giambattista are saints for all they did for me." Her eyes grew sad, distant. For a moment her lower lip trembled as though, recalling her departed friend, she were about to weep. And then as abruptly as her sadness had come she forced it away, affecting an endearing smile. "Will Antonio be all right?"

He nodded, touched her hand again. "I swear it. He is now being protected by men far stronger than your enemies. No harm will come to him, I promise you."

She did not seem entirely convinced. "He is being watched by them, I know, but if anything should happen…"

"They will take care of it. Trust me, Mademoiselle, with your friend as you have trusted me with yourself. I have given my word to Antonio and I will honor it."

Her face became genuinely grateful. "Thank you, Monsieur."

He favored her with a smile and leaning forward he allowed his hand to very briefly touch her face. "Would you like for me to leave you alone now?" _Please_, _my love, be merciful, be strong enough for yourself but be merciful…_

"No!" She laughed, almost blushed. "Forgive me. If you must leave, I understand, but if not…would you stay with me?"

_Such mercy, my darling, though you do not know it. _"If that is your wish, then I will." He relaxed in the chair, learning back from her. It was becoming easier to look at her now, and for this he would be able to stay.

She sighed rather contentedly. "Your friend and his wife," she said after a moment. "Will they mind me being here?"

"Of course not. Even if they did, Lorenzo owes me an official lifetime of favors."

"I do not wish to be any trouble."

"And likewise you are not. Just as beyond the awareness of the world there are men who work to destroy, as those who are searching for you, there are also men whose work is to protect in ways that the proper authorities cannot." _And there are those who stand in view of all the world against the tyranny of the former, who die, perhaps vainly, for their cause._

"Which am I, Monsieur?" It was a serious question. "Which do you think I am?"

_You are the voice of millions, the voice of the people. You are Sakura Hanasaki. _He swallowed against saying this. "You are neither. You are a kind but unfortunate woman who has become involved in their works."

An almost cynical smile touched at her lips. "How do you know this? They found no record of my existence in the base, not as a soldier, an employee or even a prisoner. I was not a prisoner, though; they found me free and unharmed. How do you know that I was not a murderer along with him?"

_Because I knew him and I knew you, and I know that he would not have wasted his treasure in so base a thing as a soldier or an employee. He used your son for those. He would have wanted you for something even more amusing to him, his very own experiment…_ "Because I am certain that you were not." He had spoken this too sharply. "You are far too kind to have been."

"But perhaps I was not so kind then." She fell silent, seemed to be considering this. Again her brow furrowed and she bit down pensively upon her lip. A quiet sound escaped her throat as though she were in pain.

"Is something wrong?"

She met his eyes frantically, and when she spoke her voice was forceful, almost panicked. "May I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"This morning, when I saw you, I called you 'assassin'--I remember it" She swallowed; her eyes burned into his intensely. "Is there a reason I said that?"

He shuddered, looked away. He could not answer this. It was not his place to do so. It was not his right. But then whose place was it, if not his, and did she not have the right to know that he knew who she was, and that she was not what she feared? Would it not ultimately be a greater sin _not _to tell her, to allow her to continue believing that her past was entirely unknown and to thus let her live under the fear of the person she once was? Or did he only desire to tell her out of his own selfishness?

She looked at him helplessly. "Please, Monsieur, is there a reason I called you that?"

He blinked, cleared his throat. "I would not know, Lisette. I am sorry."

A large tear fell from her dark eye. "But you _do_ know. The way you looked at me--you know _something_, at least. You have to." Her voice broke pitifully. "I beg of you: whatever you know, please tell me. _Please_."

He could bear this no longer. "YouYyou called me 'assassin' because I _am _an assassin." _God forgive me, I cannot do this, I cannot tell her, she must not know…_

Her tearful eyes brightened. "Then I know you…you know who I am…"

_Have mercy upon me, my love, have mercy. _"I…I do."

She sobbed and before he could move in protest she embraced him, throwing her slender arms about him so tightly, so desperately, that for a moment he could not breathe. Her tears soaked his face, his black shirt, and as she sobbed her body shuddered against his, sending a chill down his spine. He thought of that night on the mountain, when in her uncharacteristic anguish she had wept in his arms, how he had loved her then, how it had seemed that she loved him. _My darling, I love you now, though you do not know it. I love you. _He wanted to embrace her, he wanted to tell her everything, to tell her that he loved her. He wanted to just for one moment make her his Sakura again.

"I knew it," she said quietly, burying her face in his shoulder. "When I saw you, when I saw your face, I knew it…." Her voice was frantic, desperate. She raised up and looked at him, her almond eyes streaming with tears as he had once seen her body stream with blood. "Y-you know who I am," she stammered. "Then this…this is why you agreed to help Antonio, because of me…"

"No." He shook his head rapidly, held her out away from him. "No--I didn't know then. I had no idea."

"But…" She searched his face, dug her fingertips into his wrists almost painfully. "You must have, you--you didn't know? You really didn't?"

"No, Sa--Mademoiselle Coulmier." He swallowed, looked at her in astonishment. What a fool he was, and now he had committed the greatest sin, one that could not be taken back--

She eased away from him, edging back onto the bed and furrowing her brow, perplexed. "Wh-what were you going to call me?"

_Forgive me, forgive me, my darling. _"Nothing, Mademoiselle." He made the mistake of glancing away from her, damning himself in spite of his denial.

She gasped and brazenly taking hold of his face she forced him to look at her. "Sakura," she said, pronouncing the name strangely in her thick French accent. "You called me that this morning, didn't you? Sakura…" She shuddered, and as she released him her dark eyes became hazy, distant, as though her mind were traveling far out of this room, searching for something, something she could not quite grasp, something…

_Yes, my love, remember it, for but an instant remember it and know it, know that you are my Sakura, even if it causes you pain, I beg of you, even if your mind rebels against it as we both know it will, please, just this once…_

"I know that name," she whispered, but it seemed that she was not truly speaking to him. Her large eyes narrowed. "I…I have heard that name."

He summoned his courage, touched her shoulder lightly. "Yes, Mademoiselle."

"I…" Her voice trailed off; she groaned as if in pain and grabbed madly at her hand, tangling her fingers in her black hair.

He could not move. It struck him that he was very close to being frightened. "What is it, Lisette?" His tongue stumbled over the name, reviling it.

She threw her head back up, glared into his eyes with frantic intensity. "It is my name, my name is Sakura?"

He swallowed painfully. _God, but he could not endure this much longer. _"Sakura Hanasaki."

She repeated the name to herself without ceremony or significance. He eyes seemed to glow with a fresh vitality devoid of tears. "Then Lisette Coulmier—"

"--is a fabrication. You are Sakura Hanasaki; it was confirmed this afternoon."

The expression on her beauteous face became that of a new convert receiving their first Benediction. "And you--you know me, but I did not recognize your name…but I have seen your face before?"

He could only nod. A bead of perspiration dripped down his forehead. "Yes."  
"And I called you 'assassin' because I knew your face…then I did not truly know you?"

_He must not lie to her, a lie would be too cruel, too unmerciful to them both. _"No, you…you knew me." How quiet was his voice now, how desolate. "I do not know why you did not recognize my name. I do not know why any of this is happening, really."

She sat back upon the bed, contemplative, and yet beneath her thoughtful exterior he could sense her desperation, her excitement, straining beneath her smooth flesh, bubbling within her veins. "And did I know you as an assassin? Did I…was I one of your clients?" She fell silent, stricken with horror at the prospect.

He shook his head quickly. "No. I had given up the profession, so to speak, before we met. You were…you were the only one who knew what I was, and you called me 'assassin' in private…"

"We were…friends, then?" Her eyes were almost hopeful.

He favored her with the warmest smile he could muster. "Yes, Sakura. We were."

She leaned forward again, folding her trembling hands nervously. "You must tell me this, Monsieur. You must tell me everything."

He turned away, focused on the clock. So obscured was his vision that he could not read the time. "Please, Lisette…Sakura."

She sighed almost angrily, and yet when she spoke she sounded as if she were about to weep again. "Monsieur Lowe…Odin, with all due respect, you do not know what these past two years have been like for me. I have been through three different agencies in an attempt to find someone who could tell me who I am, and all three could find no one. I have spent every day wondering who I am, what kind of person I was before this happened to me. I have spent every day terrified that I might have been an even greater monster than Dekim Barton himself. There is nothing I have wanted more than to find someone, just one person who can tell me who I am, and this…" Her voice broke pitifully. "This cannot be an accident, it cannot be, I have wanted it far too long…"

He looked at her again, resigned himself to her request. "Is this truly what you want, Mademoiselle?" _Mademoiselle, Madame, my pale one, my love._

She nodded gravely. "Yes. Whatever it is, yes."

"Very well then." He rose from the chair and went to the door, upon which he had earlier hung his coat. From the pocket he withdrew one of her pictures, the beautiful photograph in which at her breast she held her infant son. How haunted were her eyes in this one, how dark and full of all the promise of anxiety. How devoid of that they were now. He could not give all of this back to her. She was innocent now, pure and untainted as a young girl, and he could not dare to destroy that. And yet Dekim Barton had dared to take from her that darkness; he had destroyed her utterly. What difference did it make, ultimately, if he granted this her most desperate wish?

He handed her the photograph, studied the change in her expression. Her large eyes grew wider and her full lips parted, and through them passed a slow and deep sigh, like the final breath of one dying. "This is a photograph of me," she whispered, looking up at him almost in amazement. "This is me."

"Yes, Sakura." To say that name again, to behold her radiant face and to ascribe to it her beautiful name, was almost too much, and strangely calling her this felt as though he were lying.

"And the child?"

"He is your son."

"_Mon Dieu._" Again her eyes filled with tears, and pressing the photograph to her tremulous lips, she repeated the phrase, until at last she began to weep once more. "You must tell me," she whispered, without looking up at him. "I beg you, Monsieur."

He sighed, lowered his eyes. And without the image of her face before him he began to speak. The words came slowly at first, and each initial description was vague, but gradually he felt his tongue began to loosen, and the narrative became more truthful, spoken as smoothly as one might tell a fictional story. He told her first of how he had met her, after he had dangerously removed himself from his dealings with the Cosmos Arm, how she had presented herself as a man to fight him and proved more than just a worthy opponent. She asked for an explanation of this and foolishly he realized that she would not know anything about the temple in the mountains of Japan, or anything of her own upbringing there, and regressing several years his narrative turned to her life before they had met: the deaths of her parents at the hands of the Arm, her exceptional intelligence and strength in her studies at the temple, her inherent, almost Zen tranquillity, her close friendship with Nobuyoshi Hanasaki and her subsequent marriage to him. He told of Sakura's deep and private bitterness toward the Alliance and how it began to control her life, until at last, as the Alliance grew dramatically in power, she had left the safety of the mountain to join in the official opposition. He gave to her another photograph, this one of herself, of Sakura, standing before a crowd of her followers at one of her rallies. She studied it for several minutes, caught between wonder and anguish, and then finally she met his eyes again.

"This is me?" she asked, her voice thick with perplexed disbelief.

He nodded. He went on to describe her career as a political opponent, how she had become a figure of reckoning in the eyes of Alliance, how her followersCmany of whom she had taken it upon to know personallyChad loved her. He told her of the birth of her son, of the happiness she had found in him. And at last, through all her frequent questions and her calm weeping, of her husband's tragic death and what was believed to be her own, explaining the presence of the scars upon her abdomen, of all that was known to have happened to her son afterward.

Indeed, he told her everything, everything but his love for her and the love she requited him.

An hour passed, another. Her weeping gradually subsided but with its cessation she became silent, and closing her eyes as she listened she laid her head upon her raised knees, embracing herself as a child might.

"I would like to be alone now," she said when all was finished, and elsewhere in the house a clock chimed the hour. She still could not look at him.

"I understand." He stood up, trembling still, and started for the door.

"One more thing, Monsieur."

He glanced back at her, fought against a shudder at seeing her vacant face. "Yes?"

"I would like to speak with him."

"With whom, _ma chere_?"

"Yuan-Chen. I would like to speak with him."

"It is done, then." He removed his coat from the door, grasped the knob.

"_Merci_, Monsieur Lowe," she whispered, and said no more.

He did not even look back at her. He left the room, easing the door shut behind him. For several minutes he could do nothing but lean against it, struggling to regain his composure, to slow the pounding of his heart. His vision blurred, and closing his eyes he felt something warm course down his face, rolling down onto his lips.

The woman in that room was not Sakura. He had known this from the beginning; he had known it throughout his monotonous narrative. Sakura Hanasaki was dead. She had never been anything otherwise.

_Forgive me, my love, my departed beauty, forgive me…_

He left his post at the door, journeyed to the back of the house. As he passed the living room he heard the faint sound of someone typing at a computer and peering inside he saw in the white glow of the monitor Rhyn, returned from his excursion sometime while he had been with Lisette.

"Evening, lovely," Rhyn said, glancing up at him and smiling. He had once again, it seemed, recovered from his shocked despondency to find his usual self.

"Good evening, Rhyn."

"Is she…awake?"

He nodded, stepped into the room. "Yes. She does not remember what happened."

Rhyn looked at him, examined his face. "I suppose the two of you had a nice and lengthy talk, judging by your eyes. You're starting to look your age, you are. But don't worry, love, you're still beautiful to me."

He managed a slight smile to make Rhyn feel as though he were helping.  
"Thank you." He paused, deliberating. "I would like you to do two things for me, if you would."

Rhyn raised an eyebrow. "Of course, _bello_. And what are they, now?"

He cleared his throat, tried to sound as official as usual. "First, I would like you to check on an incident that occurred last night—"

"You mean the shooting?"

"Yes. It is probably nothing of import to us, but nonetheless, I would like for you to find the identity of the victim and the hospital to which he was taken."

"Consider it done. And secondly?"

"Secondly, I would like for you to contact Yuan-Chen and inform him of the situation. Tell him that he is coming to Rome. I will handle all the arrangements."

Rhyn's eyes brightened. "He's coming here?"

Odin at last was able to favor him with a true smile. "Yes, Rhyn. Hence saying that he is coming to Rome."

"May I call him first?"

"If you wish."

He smiled happily and gasped, as though something of importance had just occurred to him. "There's something I almost forgot to tell you," he said, turning back to the computer and tapping another key.

Odin raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"I've found why they let her keep that disk, but then we don't know why those men are looking for it."

"And?"

He hit yet another key and a box appeared on the screen, reading: NO FILES FOUND. "It's empty. There's nothing on it."

_Of course_. "Why does that not surprise me," he muttered, and touching the boy's shoulder in parting he left the room.

42


End file.
